In Berlin, meanwhile, I developed a love for analysis. Perhaps more the word than the process, which remained somewhat beyond my reach. I pictured analysis like a great maw devouring jungles and mountains and swamps and transforming them into a single radiant highway. I walked the streets, trying to think. On one side was me. On the other were Science, Truth, the Destiny of Mankind. In between was analysis.
That was how we were. We knew nothing of the catastrophes to come. And just because, perhaps due to weariness and old age, I am unable to describe this phase of my life other than ironically, does not mean that Jerzy, or I, were stupid.
How did I look in Berlin, a year after taking the bus from Naklo? A little more recognisably myself, I suppose. But I ran more than walked. And the face was leaner than now, and the hair not a disappointment. Smiling. Fervid. Certain, or so I thought. I can see the others who were around me better than I can see myself, thrown together on a bench under copies of angry and righteous paintings smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and laughing at capitalists. I did it too. When we wanted to laugh loudest we thought of American capitalists. We had seen buildings filleted like fish by bombs. We saw men with whips herding people they’d never met on to trains. We saw schools turned into places of torture. We saw men who used to dress formally for dinner eating the flesh of dogs. We had seen necessity, like the exposed bone of a broken limb. How could we not laugh at a country where the most urgent questions concerned the activities of athletes, the apparel of movie stars or whether or not to buy a certain electrical machine capable of turning bread into toast? How had they arrived at such vacancy? How was it that their leaders could not think? There was not an idea from there that we had not discarded. In fact there were no ideas at all there, we declared. History had laid down the rails and we were on the train. Maybe they would come along in our wake. Or maybe we would devour them.
Where was the doubt that has accompanied me through nearly all the years since then, this doubt lodged somewhere within me like a polyp?
There was a light tap on the door of my student room in Berlin. When I opened it I found there a Soviet general of vast dimensions in full dress uniform, row upon row of medals and ribbons across his chest, jowls the colour of pork hanging over his collar and on to his shoulders, hat off and clutched in his little pale hands, a mirthful smile hidden away in the folds and gatherings of his fat. Was the delicate knock a joke, I wondered? He told me he was in Berlin for logistics meetings for a German–Soviet exercise and was calling on me at the request of Jerzy, whom he met after giving a lecture at the military academy in Moscow. I couldn’t stop looking at him. If little children were to play on him they could drown in the quicksand of his stomach. How did he take a bath?
We went down the stairs and out into the street where a black car was waiting.
‘Your friend Jerzy is a glory of the firmament,’ he said to me, guiding me into the back seat. ‘The brightest and most promising young man yet to come before me.’
Of course, I was proud.
At the restaurant I watched him. This, I thought, was how the lords of the continent ate long ago. Herrings with parsley and oil. Iced vodka. Salad. Plates of vegetables sending clouds of steam up to the ceiling. A whole fish bursting with mushrooms, its angry-looking mouth pointed at me. Then a slab of meat still clinging to the bone. This in itself looked like a piece of furniture. Two bottles of wine just for him. Crumbs and little bones and streams of oil coursing from the corners of his mouth and into the folds of fat gathered around his chin and neck. None of these things came out. I wondered what else was in there. A piece of chocolate cake buoyed up with ice-cream came next. Every now and again a long breezy belch. ‘Eat! Eat!’ he told me whenever he remembered that I was there.
He asked for a bottle of vodka to be brought to the table. He opened his uniform jacket, loosened his tie. Then he made that oddly feminine gesture I have often seen fat men make, arms pressed down on to the rests of the chair, the bulk lifting, bottom shifted one way and the torso the other, a few wriggles in this manner this way and that, then, rearranged, settled, lowering himself back down into his seat again, a little inclined towards the table, hands up around his chest like a squirrel’s as he examined what remained before him. The candles were guttering, the cooks were removing their aprons in the kitchen, the waiters drawing back chairs to help people to their feet. The General made a long sigh, emptied a shot of vodka. He looked a little sad for a moment, the sadness of satiation perhaps, the monotony of it. But it passed. By now I was fond of him. It was his matronly gestures when asking me to eat, his affection for the food, his ease of manner when asking for and eating it, like a carpenter with his tools. He looked at me and smiled.
‘You want to know about Jerzy?’ he said. ‘Of course you do. You are his oldest friend, he tells me. A good young man, as I can see myself.
‘Well, I met him at a dinner. It was the kind of dinner I hate – thirty teachers and ten of the most promising cadets. They put me up at the top table with the senior professors. That was the worst of it. They won’t let you eat. But you see they would have felt they had to keep me close to them. I go back to the Bolsheviks and all the way through Stalingrad. I was in the hunting party across Poland to Berlin. So you see? I am unquestionable. They fear me.
‘After the meal they brought Jerzy up to sit next to me. I already knew about him. “None of the others can touch him,” they said. They were right about that. Did you ever see Chinese cooks with their knives? They seem to have six hands. That’s how it was when he spoke. Six brains. I’ve been around a little, but he shocked me, this boy. How old could he be? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? How does he think so fast? Where does he get such confidence?
‘The dinner ended. We all got up and walked out. I was still talking with Jerzy. You can see by now that everything in life except food is ridiculous to me. But I didn’t want to go to bed that night. I wanted to hear more from Jerzy. He brought me back to some time, some feeling. We kept walking. We passed through the gymnasium. He said, “Would you like to swim?” “Yes,” I said. We couldn’t find the light for the pool. We undressed in the darkness. We had to go on our hands and knees just to find where the water started. He dived, I slipped in like an otter. I could have had the whole of the faculty on their way to the mines in the morning but somehow I was afraid of getting caught. Like I was a schoolboy again. We floated on our backs speaking of the decisions faced by Hannibal on the route into Rome. We went on like this for more than an hour.
‘We got out and dried ourselves and went into a garden. I sat on a bench and he sat in the grass. We talked, we joked, we told each other stories. It wasn’t light yet. It was still that time when all nature is silent. I thought, I am an old man. What am I doing here? But I couldn’t draw away.
‘At some point he became solemn. He spoke very softly. He was hesitating, he couldn’t get all the words for what he wanted to say. But then they came to him. He talked about the soul of Man, how to ignite it, how to bring belief to it. He talked about building the tension in the world to such a pitch that all the forces of capitalism could do nothing to extinguish it and all the old structures would break and fell away. Then the true glory of Man could shine through. He was speaking of world revolution, of course. Well first of all that is not our policy. It’s been debated at congresses and been rejected. No, forget that. That’s not the important thing. My young friend, I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know. But I can tell you that everything is stupid. Everything is a mess. There will never be anything done about it. This is what your friend Jerzy will face in his life. But somehow, there in the garden, the way it was, the quiet, the darkness, and you know, the way he was speaking, I believed him. No, that’s not right. I couldn’t do that. But I believed in him. He was making such beautiful sentences. He was excited and I was watching him, his hands moving in front of him, his wonderful shining eyes and I was … What am I saying?’
The General looked around the room. His ha
nds opened and closed in the air. He took a shot of vodka.
‘Well, yes. I will say it. I was falling in love with him. That’s what was happening. I mean, it’s ridiculous. That’s clear. And where did it come from? All these years in the army with boys and men and never thinking these things. Married thirty-five years, three sons all in the military. A grandfather. So fat I nearly have to be helped out of a chair. But it wasn’t a sexual kind of love. I didn’t think of that. It was that he brought me something that I hadn’t felt since I was young. It was his eyes. They were so magnificent, so beautiful. The excitement he felt, the words that came out of him, his eyes, so pure, so committed, so honest …’
He looked around my face and then sighed. His chin dropped down on his chest.
I think suddenly of a hot summer evening in Chicago. I was walking through a park by the lake. It was August 1969, the shadows long, the dusk slowly falling. The Appalachians were dousing the charcoal in the barbecue pits and packing up their baskets. The baseball diamonds were silent. Out on the lake, boats glided on the serene blue water. At a stand selling hot dogs and drinks I sat in the shade and drank lemonade. I was not thinking about much. I had been standing all day in a blue and gold uniform with hat at a turnstile taking entrance tickets to a furniture exhibition. I walked on past the transistor radios and the lovers under the trees.
Ahead of me, in a clearing, was a fire. Yellow flames in a wild dance, an orator with a weak chin and black hair like a heap of wool on his head to one side of the blaze and on the other a gathering of young men and women. Some of them had motorcycle helmets on their heads. Some were carrying spears. I didn’t get it at first, but then I came to understand that they were getting ready to move, to sweep down with others into the city in order to destroy everything that was in their path. The orator was working their anger like a man lifting a car with a jack, notch by notch. The jailers, the murderers in uniform, the thieves in suits, he reminded them. They will send you off to die in a foreign war just to make themselves rich. I had seen this malignancy and the men who engendered it too, I thought. And then I thought, Why not? How many opportunities for rage had I let pass unmarked? I had lived in a time and a place where nothing else was apt. Yet I kept it to myself. I slipped in among the young people, and then we ran out together into the streets. We moved like a plague.
That night I broke twelve panes of glass and set fire to three cars and a bus.
I come now to that moment in the hotel room in Erfurt of which I spoke earlier, that moment when I became myself. I was working there during the summer in advance of my final year at the university. It was the idea of my professor of history. ‘An education should include the knowledge of what it is to be a worker,’ he said.
The morning when it happened was bright and hot. I was wearing, as ever, my polished shoes and the bow tie I’d had to forgo two days of lunches for. I had orders to go to the room of a Russian apparatchik to clear away his breakfast plates. I remember, just before, the black eyebrow of the chef travelling up his forehead as he cut the head from a fish in the kitchen. I remember the whorls in the dark grain of the wood on the stairs as I ascended and the thickened air of the room as I opened the door, the smell of human sleep there, of melon and leather and privilege, with a light sweet smell of perfume drifting through it as though to a tune played on an accordion. On a round table with little wheels, amid the plates and cups and debris of food, was a cigarette case made of silver, dark chocolate pressed into the shape of a fan, the trace of lipstick on a cup. I could see all the tiny creases of the woman’s lip where it had met the surface of the porcelain. The smell of cognac was gathered like a low fog within the confines of the cup. A blackberry bled its juices into the fibres of the white cloth that covered the table.
The bright morning light fell through the window and on to the bed and I went over to sit on it. How demure the apparatchik and his woman had been. I could see the impress of two bodies and ripples like water makes in sand, but otherwise the sheets were crisp. Of the man there remained his leather bags and newspapers and cigarette ends, but of the woman I got only the perfume, hanging like a phantom over the sheets.
I saw then at my feet, half hidden by the bedclothes, a book face down on the floor. I remember the book’s faded green cover and the delicacy of the hand that had inscribed a name inside – Lena Nowak, 1946. The book was written in Polish and it was on the side of the bed where the woman had lain through the night. Now she was gone with her lipstick and her roubles. I had not seen this man of the Kremlin, but I pictured him fat, flatulent and without joy. And she with lips like a little red bow, delicate white shoulders and a voice that never rose above a whisper. So many pretty girls in rooms such as these from towns like mine – so well presented, so polite, so helpless. Why was she not walking with me on that morning along the lake shores of Pomerania?
I often felt when I entered rooms such as this so filled with the lives of strangers a feeling of exaltation – the exaltation of invisibility, perhaps. I sat on the bed in a little cloud of perfume and began to read. The sun warmed my hands and face. I have tried in the years that have passed since to remember the title of the green book and the name of the man who wrote it, but I cannot. And I remember nothing of what he said. I remember only that he was a monk and that these were his prayers and meditations and that I badly wanted to know what Lena Nowak was reading as she lay beside the sleeping Russian she had been summoned to entertain. I tried to catch the rhythm and the meaning of his words, but it was difficult. I would read five sentences, maybe eight, and then stop. The words seemed out of order. I could not grasp them. They were like a thicket. I looked at the little clock at the side of the bed. 10.14 it said. How long before they came looking for me? I closed my eyes and lifted my face and let the sun fall over it. The silence of the room seemed like a kind of music. Inside I felt movement, very sweet and sure, like the whirring of a hundred dials. It seemed to cool me. I looked down and began again to read and when I did the words of the monk went in through my eyes and mouth and the pores of my skin, they were in my lungs and were carried along in my blood, each of them like a living thing, and when they came into my head they opened like a rose and let out a sheet of flame, a brilliant light that had whiteness and gold and carried no heat. It burned with its cool light the things that stood before it – things that had blocked my sight, the frustration I had felt as I struggled to make a picture of the world as ornate and perfect as a cathedral through the power of analysis. It lifted me, and I let myself be lifted. It was fast, and I had no fear. Then it stopped and there was silence and stillness and peace. The clock said 10.21. I looked around and so many things – the trace of the Russian’s body on the sheets, the wallpaper, the little pile of dust on the window ledge – they all seemed so funny to me then. Something amazing and irreversible had happened. All that I had struggled to understand with logic and categories was now flowing and churning around me. I was in the world as if for the first time, thrown into it somehow by the words of the monk. I no longer had to arrange or comprehend it. I could just be in it. I was free. It was so simple and obvious. How was it I had never felt like that before? What had stopped me? I lifted Lena Nowak’s pillow to my face and took in the last traces of her presence. I thought, My girl, how fine I could be with you now!
After my rime at the university I was put to work in an office concerned with the distribution of eggs. Our area was Thüringen. We were in a room high up in a building looking down on to a square, the trees heavy with leaves. We kept the windows open from spring to autumn, the breezes blowing in. The square was like the mouth of a child losing his teeth, gaps in the terraces where bombs had removed the buildings. To one side of me was Pawel, a tall dark Pole with spectacles, caustic in a way that was sometimes too familiar to me, too exhausting. At other times I turned to him for this same quality when I wanted the comfort of the familiar. On the other side was Dieter, the son of German communists driven to Manchester in England, where he grew up. H
e came back alone. He did not want to miss it, he said, this great adventure. He had red hair and freckles. He was so short that his face had always to be inclined upwards when he spoke, even to women. At night he helped make scenery for a youth theatre and worked in a literacy programme for factory workers. And no one took more seriously his responsibility for the efficient movement of eggs. Sometimes it was too much for him and his head dropped down on his desk. When this happened Pawel tied him to his chair with a complex system of knots and tickled him behind his ear with a feather. ‘Where did you get those knots?’ we asked him. ‘In the Scouts,’ he said. ‘I know more knots than a sailor.’
We were watched over by our head, Gottfried, camp veteran, conspirator. He liked us to call him ‘Onkel’, or uncle. He was never without his pipe. He moved around our rooms like the basketball coaches I saw years later on the school playgrounds in Chicago, enthusing, cajoling, clapping us on the back, poking at the air with his pipe. ‘Talk! Think! Stimulate! Debate!’ he called out. ‘This is not just about eggs. It’s a way of looking at the world!’
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