by James Lasdun
We drove to Otto’s apartment. Kitty arrived with Heinrich soon after us. She threw her arms around me. ‘Stefan! I’m so happy to see you!’ She had changed remarkably little: same lively grey eyes, same unaffected warmth in their expression. She had qualified as a nurse specialising in care of the elderly, she told me. She was married, to a nightclub manager. They had a boy aged ten. As we talked, the simple creaturely ease of our brief fling came back to me on a warm current of remembrance. I had no wish to rekindle things between us, and nor, I am sure, did she, but I felt an immense gladness that such an interlude had been permitted to occur in my life. Beside her my uncle hung awkwardly, an uncertain smile on his face. Physically he looked in excellent shape: trim and spruce, good colour, his brown three-piece suit as well-fitting on him as the bark of a healthy tree. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong with him. ‘Hello,’ I said, offering my hand. He took it, tilting his head questioningly. ‘I’m Stefan Vogel,’ I told him. He gave a little gallant bow: ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance. Isn’t this a jolly occasion? Are you a frequent habitué?’ I did my best to conduct a conversation with him, aware that for all my belief in his fundamental decency I bore him a great deal of ill will, and that his condition, far from diminishing this, was adding to it a layer of resentment for the fact that he had apparently succeeded in putting himself beyond all possible reckoning. After a few pleasantries had passed between us, a vacant look appeared on his face. He drew close to Kitty, standing behind her for the rest of the reception like a child cowering behind a parent, examining the contents of his pockets and from time to time glancing out at me mistrustfully.
The caller Otto had mentioned was waiting for me in the lobby of my hotel when I arrived there that evening, her slight frame bundled in a wet brown parka. A smirk crinkled her face as she caught my look of dismayed recognition. Margarete Menzer.
‘There you are. Good. I heard about your father. Condolences. Do you have time for a drink?’
I couldn’t think of an excuse, and lacked the bluntness to turn her down without one.
‘All right,’ I heard myself say.
We went into the hotel bar, a twilit place done up in sheet metal and rawhide, with a young crowd talking in loud voices over the pulsing beat of a synthetic drum.
‘Chic hotel,’ she said, grinning at a party of men with shaved heads and elaborate underlip topiary. ‘You must be selling lots of poems!’
‘It’s the cheapest place I could find.’
‘You mean with gold taps and a private sauna!’
We found a dark nook and ordered drinks. She drank quickly: white wine, then vodka. Her hair, more frizzy now than curly, was tinged with grey; a mass of little iron springs. Her eyes, though, darting to and fro like a bird’s above her sharp nose and chin, were black and shiny as ever. As they flickered over me, I felt the reassertion of the proprietorial interest she had taken in me from the start; the claim she had seemed to stake in me, as if recognising a member of her own species. ‘It’s good to see you again, Stefan,’ she said, patting me lightly on the knee. ‘I couldn’t resist the chance of catching up when I found out you were coming over. I hope you don’t mind?’ I shook my head, wanting only to get this over with as quickly as possible. She had become a journalist, she told me, a freelancer for an Internet publication. ‘Very cutting-edge,’ she said with a grin, by which I took her to mean that she had found her way back into her old element of rumour and innuendo. She was single, she declared suddenly, with the overemphatic candour of someone who has consciously disinhibited herself. She took off her parka, revealing a surprisingly flimsy lace blouse. In it, the Margarete of my no doubt feverishly suspicious imagination was briefly supplanted by a possibly more objective Margarete: human, lonely, trying to look her best. A vodka or two later, she was asking if the bedrooms here were as funkily decorated as this bar. Was I tempted to offer to show her? Only out of a certain morbid curiosity; to find out what it would be like to occupy the blackest end of the spectrum of my possible selves. I resisted: ‘No. They’re very boring.’ She chuckled. ‘Still happily married?’ ‘Extremely.’ ‘How nice.’ Far from driving her off, my coldness seemed to cement her presence. She ordered more drinks, unpacked cigarettes from her purse and sank back into her seat with a contented look, as if we had just agreed to make a night of drinking and gossip.
‘So,’ she said, ‘have you been back?’
‘Back where?’
‘Prenzlauer Berg, of course.’
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t recognise it. All chichi boutiques now.’ She laughed, then gave a large, somewhat theatrical sigh: ‘What a time that was! Those poets! All those crazy friends of my brother’s, busy informing on each other day and night. No wonder they had a problem with plain language!’ She glanced at me. ‘You knew about that, right, the informing?’ ‘More or less.’ ‘My brother got most of the notoriety but they were all at it – Paul Boeden, Uwe Wardezky; Reinhard Kolbe’s father was the Firm’s own officer for cultural affairs!’ I listened impassively as she continued, my face a mask of neutral attentiveness. She knocked back her drink – something staged in the recklessness of the gesture, I remember thinking, as though she felt it necessary to go through the motions of relinquishing self-control, for appearances’ sake, before she could allow herself to unleash whatever mischief she had in mind. ‘And it wasn’t just the poets either,’ she continued. ‘Half the peace activists too. Sitting around discussing plans for some illegal anti-nuclear protest one minute, then scurrying off to tell their controls all about it! Hilarious, really! And nobody was above it. That’s my considered opinion. Nobody at all. Not me, not you, not anyone. Amazing what a little fear will do to people!’ She paused, drawing deeply on a cigarette and looking at me with a provocative grin, as if waiting for me to raise an objection. I was aware of a tightening in my chest, but I said nothing, not wanting to make things easier for her. ‘The theatre people also,’ she went on, blowing out her smoke, ‘none of them had their hands clean. Not a single person. Not one.’ She was locked on her target now, I could feel that; coursing forward on some riptide of malice. ‘Benno Mautner,’ she continued, ‘he’s the one who got the Stasi along for that swords-to-ploughshares performance –’
‘All right Margarete –’ I interrupted her.
‘What? You don’t remember? Where his actors all wore those insignias . . .’
‘I remember, but –’
‘But what? You don’t want to hear?’
‘Not really. I’m not that interested any more.’
‘Well, here’s something that’ll interest you –’
It occurs to me that if I had allowed her to seduce me she might have spared me this. A purely chivalrous infidelity, that would have been! Protect the honour of your beloved by going to bed with her rival . . . But on the other hand, given her and her brother’s peculiar gifts, she would more likely have found a way of having her cake and eating it.
‘I doubt it,’ I said.
‘Inge.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Yes. Your lovely wife. Not then, but later.’ Her eyes had darted up to gauge my reaction. ‘You didn’t know, did you? What I thought. Well, don’t go blaming her. She had every right to turn on Thilo after he dumped her like that. Still, I heard that without her testimony they wouldn’t have got the conviction that put him away. Your own contribution was apparently ruled inadmissible on account of your vested interest in the matter. You remember what sticklers for procedural correctness they were. Might as well have kept your hands clean! Wait – where are you going, Stefan? Have I upset you?’
I had stood up, and was putting on my coat.
‘Don’t be upset! No one cares about this shit any more –’
‘Go to hell, Margarete,’ I said, turning my back on her.
My body was trembling. I strode back across the lobby and on out through the revolving doors to the street. There was no question of my believing Margarete’s repul
sive slander, but just hearing it spoken, hearing Inge’s name dragged like a shot-down swan through the mire of this goblinous procuress’s vindictive imagination, was unbearable. If I could have foreseen that her brother was going to blackmail me a few years later, on precisely the basis of Inge’s untarnished integrity, her absolute dissimilarity from myself and all these other fiends, I would have flung that in her face too (though, come to think of it, maybe my visceral reaction to Margarete’s lies was in fact what gave Menzer the idea that I might be susceptible to blackmail in the first place!). I felt nauseous, dizzy, disgusted. Plunging blindly up past the Gendarmenmarkt, I found myself heading east on what must have been Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, then before I knew it, crossing Alexanderplatz to Prenzlauer Allee. Only here did any thought of revisiting the old neighbourhood come to mind, and even then it was more a kind of helpless, passive gravitation than anything considered. The rain had thinned to a wet mist in which the new illuminations of the quarter shone glassily. Here were Saarbrücker Strasse, Metzer Strasse, Strassburger Strasse – so familiar and yet all so changed, as though I had travelled back in time only to find the past itself altered. The old brick warehouse with its barred portholes was gone, in its place a French parfumerie, the display cabinets behind its plate-glass window shedding a violet glow. I stared in, trying to picture the interior as it had been: an effort at first, as though the image were ashamed of its plainness in the face of the luxurious resplendence that had usurped it, and reluctant to be exhumed. But after a while I found myself imagining again the dark, tatty auditorium that had once occupied this space, and from there I was able to summon the figure of Inge as I had first beheld her, bringing her to mind in all her savage purity, until I could feel her luminous, incandescent spirit flooding into me once again, unblemished, purging the corrosive poison of Margarete’s words, and shining inside me with the light of an inextinguishable reprieve. I can say in all truth that it has been burning there steadily ever since: my own figure of Liberty, standing sentinel at the threshold of my own incorruptible America.
BY JAMES LASDUN
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The Horned Man
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