by James Lasdun
Or was there something even more dubious at work in my mind: was I, could I possibly have been, actively interested in the pursuit and destruction of the individual whom Lieutenant Hager wanted me to help him ensnare? Is it possible I was motivated not just by some dim terror of having my fraudulent poetic credentials exposed, but also by an active desire to eliminate a rival?
I am attempting to understand myself here: not to make excuses, but not to fall into the inverse vanity of exaggerating my own misdeeds either. ‘It is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind that exists in oneself’: Frantz Fanon’s words, drummed into us at school. I summon an image of my old self to hold up for examination. I can discern fearfulness in that unformed, boyish face; I can see a lurking, secretive ambition; I can make out all sorts of furtive, inordinate desires, but in truth I can find no sign of actual malice.
On the other hand, I can hardly be an objective judge in this matter, and it seems a little late in the day to be erring on the side of anything other than harshness . . . So, let the accused stand charged with cold-blooded complicity to destroy another human being for his personal gain!
THREE O’CLOCK. Will I hear Menzer’s car? I hope not. My state of mind is somewhat precarious. I think I will be able to stay put only so long as it’s just a matter of simple obedience to the principle of inertia. Any stimulus requiring an act of will to resist is likely to prove too much.
Of course, it’s possible he won’t show up. He needed some persuading when I went down to see him again in the city. Not that he had any scruples about the act itself – or if he had, he wasn’t going to risk being out-Menzered by admitting to them in the face of my own apparent indifference. But he was concerned about the risks, and even after I had demonstrated how negligible these were – a shot that would cause no alarm, no possible connection between himself and the victim and no imaginable incentive on my part to incriminate either him or, by extension, myself – he remained sceptical.
On the other hand, he clearly needed money. He had insisted I bring my payment in cash, and the sight of this as he glanced into the large envelope I handed him over our café table had an effect on him like a surging current on an appliance: something in him seemed to dilate. Though again, as if to offset any suggestion of being impressed, he immediately put on a hard, businesslike expression.
‘Well. Suppose I were to ask you to give me the other ten in advance?’
I had come prepared for something like this, and without hesitation took a second envelope from my bag.
‘I’ll give you another five,’ I told him – the total, as it happened, of what I had been able to cash out of my trading account. ‘The rest afterwards.’
He looked thoughtfully at the envelope.
‘OK, maybe. But I’m interested in how I’m supposed to know you’ll actually give it to me afterwards.’
‘I think a better question is how will I know you won’t keep coming back for more after I do? Who has the most leverage in this situation, after all? Considering the past you and I share.’
He laughed at that, conceding the point.
‘What about Inge, though – isn’t she going to wonder about your bank balance?’
‘I deal with all our finances. She’s not interested.’
‘All right. OK. Possibly maybe. Listen, though. Not that it’s in my interest to say this, but do you really think this is going to solve your problems? With her?’
‘I’ll worry about that,’ I said.
He stared hard at me for some time. Then, abruptly, he shrugged.
‘Well, why not? Anything to help out an old pal!’
I gave him the envelope.
‘It’s almost funny,’ he said as we parted company a little later, ‘I was always the one who walked off with the marks-manship prize in our Hans Beimler games. Maybe I’m about to discover my true vocation!’
‘SO. DID YOU decide on a code name?’
My second meeting with Lieutenant Hager.
‘How about Sloth?’
‘Your school nickname?’
There is very little the lieutenant doesn’t know about me.
I shrug.
‘Well, it’s your choice. I’ll put it here in the file. You need to write out this pledge, by the way.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That you’re working for us entirely of your own free will.’
‘OK.’
The boy is present, sitting quietly on the floor, building a windmill out of Lege. He and his father belong to an ‘Interest Association’ devoted to restoring old windmills.
‘Here are permits for the journal . . .’
He wants me to launch a sort of samizdat journal, modestly risk-taking at first, so as not to arouse suspicion of official involvement, then growing steadily more inflammatory.
‘Permit to set text in type. Permit to print. Permit to bind. Permit to distribute up to one hundred copies. Be sure to submit receipts for all expenses. We’ll reimburse you every month, with a premium for good work. By that we don’t mean gossip or rumour but hard facts, along with evidence that can hold up in court. Our ministry lawyers are very particular about that. Don’t rush things: it takes time to get your legend accepted. We want people to see you as a serious editor, willing to take real chances; not just some fly-by-night renegade. We’re going to give you your own tail; it’ll add to your credibility. Wait, Detlef, that doesn’t go there . . .’
He goes over to help his boy with the windmill, working from a photograph, while continuing to talk to me from the floor:
‘I often tell people in your situation to think of themselves not only as the agent of the Stasi in the peace movement, but also as the agent of the peace movement within the Stasi. The fact is that although we do make it our business to control this so-called opposition, we’re as eager as they are to avoid a direct conflict with the West, and we’ve recognised right from the start that many of their ideas are worth paying attention to. So you see, we can learn from you. It’s just a question of whether one allows that energy to be diverted into wasteful political side issues, or whether one keeps it focused on the immediate pressing danger. Personally I find it a little immoral to be talking about, oh, I don’t know, reunification, shall we say, or so-called freedom of expression, or even individual human rights, while enough Pershings and Cruise missiles to incinerate every one of us a thousand times over are being amassed right here on our borders . . .’
He tousles his son’s hair, then gets up and returns to his chair, as if reminded by his own calm eloquence of the seriousness of the matter at hand.
‘You’re wondering what I have to say about the Soviet SS 20s,’ he continues with a smile. ‘That’s all right, we can discuss anything here. Well, I’ll tell you: having made quite an extensive study of these things, I can state categorically that the idea of being able to make peace without a credible threat of one’s own is a suicidal illusion. We would simply be swallowed up into the capitalist order, where we would incidentally occupy the very lowest rung. Anyone proposing unilateral peace has to be in effect proposing the end of socialism, which means the end of hope for all but the most powerful and predatory groups of people on the planet, and finally of course the end of the planet itself. Which is why certain potential leaders of the movement have to be considered hostile-negative forces. They may be full of noble intentions but unfortunately that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Do you see?’
I felt that the lieutenant believed what he was saying; that his words were his own and that he had come to them by his own processes of thought. Unlike my uncle, whose ‘innocence’ was no doubt largely a matter of an innate disposition to serve the prevailing system as cheerfully and faithfully as he could, Lieutenant Hager seemed to have thought hard about the cause he worked for. He prided himself on his idealism and his moral integrity (the Lege set was a case in point: only a zealot would have inflicted that dismal knockoff of
Western Lego on his child; most men in his position would have obtained a set of the real thing). His lean, smooth-drawn face, with its lines like fine wrinkles accidentally ironed into a shirt, had a distinctly monkish quality, and I have no doubt that in his own imagination he was playing the role of the hero of conscience, so pure of heart he could engage in activities of a nature that might have tainted a less sterling soul than his own.
And maybe he was right: maybe what was so catastrophically damaging to me was entirely harmless to him. Who am I, after all, to look back at that face and say with such confidence: ‘Demon’? What do I have to support this view other than my own sense of injury? History? A dubious ally: suppose its verdict had gone the other way (and after all, it has given the victor’s laurels to plenty of questionable causes over time, while cutting off plenty of noble ones before they had a chance to flower); suppose his system had triumphed, flourished into the egalitarian paradise it was all along intended to become, then how would my judgement of the lieutenant itself be judged? With precisely that incredulous scorn we reserve for all those pitiful figures from the past who failed, out of stupidity or narrow-mindedness to perceive which way the wind was blowing.
Blickfeldmassnahmen: our professional term for the act of ‘keeping someone in view’.
Abschöpfung: our word for ‘pumping’.
I was to keep Thilo Hartman ‘in view’. And, in my capacity as editor of a new and daringly outspoken oppositional magazine, I was to look for opportunities to ‘pump’ him.
THREE FORTY. Bare twigs gleaming like polished wires in the low sun. Lichen on tree trunks showing a gaudy bluish green. A breeze comes down over the clifftop; blows a flurry of yellow leaves off the birches, throwing them out into the lake of air where they spin down, catching the sunlight like gold coins.
Always this feeling of something being conveyed, in some not quite intelligible language, by that other world. Sense of being appraised by the stones, recognised for what I am by the trees. And not just from my Bausoldaten days of cutting them down.
This strange yearning they provoke in me! What the ancients had in mind with their idea of the self-slaughtered living on as trees in the afterlife? A projection of precisely this intense desire to sidestep one’s own consciousness and merge into the backdrop, the landscape?
That time, right after our marriage, when I almost made a clean breast of things to Inge. Sudden sense, as I turned to her, of the power of words to explode in the air like dynamite, and kill. I kissed her instead.
Inge. Thilo marrying that other woman was out of love for you; you must have half known that: free you from the impossible difficulty of being his lover by trying to make you hate him. Though by the time you figured it out you were here, past the point of no return, while he was – where? In jail? On trial? Alive? Dead? We didn’t know: you didn’t want to know. Your guilt about leaving required you to imagine the worst, and to live as if that were so.
That curious mood of good-humoured resignation he was in during the hour he and I spent together in the little office of my ‘magazine’. As though he knew perfectly well there was as much chance that I was in the process of betraying him even as we spoke, as that I was the sympathetic spirit I pretended to be. Choosing, out of what seemed nothing more than sheer gentlemanly magnanimity, to believe the latter, or at least to act as if he did; to respond to my casual probing with such cordial frankness I was left with the sense that even in the part of his mind that must have intuited, in general terms if not precise detail, the wire leading from the pen in my pocket to the transmitter in the heel of my shoe, he bore no ill will, and possibly even forgave me in advance (almost the hardest part for me to bear, that feeling of forgiveness; of being left entirely alone to absorb all reverberation of harm). That moment, after he had shown me the scar on his arm from biting himself in the attempt to master his own feelings of jealousy while you were dutifully following his injunction to ‘spend time’ with other men; right after that, how I abruptly changed the subject – catch him off his guard, as Lieutenant Hager had instructed me – to the question of the Soviet presence on our soil and then the even more taboo subject of reunification; how, as he gave me his truthful, treasonous answers (handing me his own smiling head on a platter), I felt as though I were traversing a rift in nature, from the far side of which all the previous stumbles and tumblings in my lifelong career of falling seemed in comparison to have occurred in a universe of almost childlike innocence!
Yesterday I bought a hunting rifle. I wrapped it in plastic and took it up to the top of the cliff. There’s an enormous fallen tree there, with several smaller trees splintered and crushed beneath it. Under its torn-up roots is a hole the size of a bomb crater. I climbed down into this and laid the rifle under a ledge of bedrock jutting in through the dirt near the bottom. Menzer has clear instructions how to find it. Assuming he comes (and I am inclined to think he will), he’ll park on the old service road for the transmission tower and make his way up the rocky path to the top of the cliff. From there, having found the rifle, he will move towards the edge of the cliff, where, peering down through the birches below him, he will see the mound of bluestone rubble with the stone bench where Inge’s ‘lover’ will be seated, wearing a fawn-coloured hat, looking out at the view as he does every afternoon between four and five o’clock. He will take one shot, which will cause no particular alarm, hunting season having opened today. Then he will go home and wait for me to contact him, which, unless I am seriously mistaken about the nature of what awaits me, will take, as they say here, for ever.
THREE FIFTY. A sheen on the horizon now; a tint of green like a tight-stretched band of silk. What else to set down? I went back a few years ago. Back to Berlin: February of 1999, for my father’s funeral. He had died of a blood clot in the cerebellum, while playing chess at his social club.
Otto picked me up at the airport. He and I had kept in touch, though he wasn’t much of a correspondent. He’d been struggling, I knew that: divorced, in and out of work, though a couple of years earlier he had turned his military training to advantage, setting up a small garage. A round beard, Amish-style, circled his broad face. It made him look young – the unshaven upper lip – though also prehistoric. He was friendly, a little bemused by me as ever, a little diffident.
‘I’ve thought a lot about you going to America,’ he said as we drove. ‘I’ve decided it must have had to do with you being a poet, having the imagination to, you know –’
I turned from him uncomfortably, trying not to listen; watching the rain-blurred parallels of Karl Marx Allee unreel on either side of us, grandiose and relentless. In my head I conducted a shattering conversation with him which would begin with my saying: Remember those aquavit bottles you got in trouble for stealing . . . ?
He must have come to an end, as there was a long silence.
‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘some woman called for you. She wanted to know if you were coming over for the funeral.’
‘Who?’
‘She didn’t say. I gave her the name of your hotel. Figured you wouldn’t mind.’
He grinned at me in the mirror, the boyish wickedness of the look confirming my sense of his inviolable innocence. Cord intact. I smiled back, trying to conceal the feeling of alarm that had come into me.
We picked up his children from his ex-wife’s apartment, then drove on to his garage. My mother, who was managing the business for him, had insisted on putting in a morning’s work before the funeral.
She was on the phone at a metal desk in a chilly office when we arrived; repeating out loud some customer’s list of mechanical ailments and typing them into a computer smudged all over with oily fingerprints. She had dyed her hair a coppery auburn colour. Her nails were long and red – the first time I had ever seen them painted. Exhaust pipes were stacked all around her on the cement floor. A stuffed pine marten crouched on the filing cabinet above her, under a calendar with a half-naked girl straddling a tyre. I stood, mesmerised. My mother! Was
it possible? Though I had known from Otto’s occasional communications that she was working with him, I had pictured the job as something entirely genteel – a little light file indexing that Otto had charitably handed her to keep her occupied; something she might mention to her friends with a glint of irony calculated to express her indomitable spirit in the face of renewed adversity, but certainly nothing harsh enough to account for this apparently wholesale stepping out of character.
‘Hand brake slipping,’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘Power steering broken . . .’
Cradling the phone between her head and shoulder, she typed away with what seemed to me an almost ostentatiously ignoble proficiency. It struck me that she must have wanted me to come upon her like this: in situ, soldiering on. Even so, the sight of her in this new incarnation – unprepared as I was by any of the tentative preliminaries that had paved the way towards her earlier transformations – was a shock.
She got off the phone, gave me a brisk, jangling embrace, and at once began talking to Otto about the need to raise prices and increase inventory. Be advised that we are now members of the mercantile class, her demeanour seemed intended to convey, and we don’t have the luxury, unlike some people, to think about anything but the immediate material necessities of life.
Was her briskness an inverted sentimentality? I looked for some sign that being together in the flesh again after all these years was as great an upheaval for her as it was for me, but if it was, she managed to conceal it, and I retaliated with a briskness of my own.
The funeral was brief and low-key, though better attended than I had expected. During the silence in which the coffin was trundled off on its rollers, I heard a strange, raucous sob from the back of the room. Glancing around, I saw a man with tears streaming down his face. A woman beside him began dabbing his cheeks with a handkerchief and patting his hand. It took me a moment to realise that the man was my Uncle Heinrich, and the woman Kitty!
‘At least we were able to do that for her,’ my mother commented afterwards, as we hurried through the rain to Otto’s car. ‘Get the social services to pay her to look after him. And to give her credit, she’s very patient with him. He’s become extremely emotional, as you could see. Not that he would have had a clue who he was weeping for – he just picks up on the atmosphere. Kitty’s the only person he recognises now. Everyone else is a stranger he thinks he has to charm each time he meets them. You’ll see for yourself, no doubt.’