A Shadow of Myself

by Mike Phillips

  Afterwards there was a party at which the more senior members of the staff were present. Gisela pointed out some of the well-known personalities to George, and soon enough she led him to where Professor Elsner was standing, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  She was a tall woman, only a few centimetres shorter than George, with a muscular, wiry body and a sweep of black hair which fell over her forehead. She shook his hand firmly, smiled broadly, then turned her head as if about to return to the conversation which Gisela had interrupted, but George stood his ground and hurriedly asked if he might speak with her for one moment. She frowned, then smiled again, a hint of resignation in her expression.

  Within the next week he had visited her twice in her office. When he told her about his training as a boxer her eyes lit up, and she invited him to join her in jogging before breakfast. She too had been an athlete, and she tried to maintain her training, merely to keep fit, but recently she had lost the partner with whom she jogged. In the following weeks they ran together, and later on, walked for hours round the park in Pankow where she lived. George had begun talking to her about his imaginary studies, but in a short time he was telling her about his life and the experiences he had gone through. He was interested in English, he told her, at which she smiled knowingly. English studies had become the opium of the progressive young, she told him, even in the East. He almost pointed out that he was only about ten years younger, but he stopped himself in time, some instinct telling him that it was her sense of his youthfulness which drew her to him. Instead, he replied that his reasons were personal, and began telling her about his father. At this moment they were sitting on a bench beside an avenue in the Schlosspark, from where it was just possible to see the crucifixes which towered over the church nearby. As she listened her body seemed to grow softer, her weight shifting slightly towards him along the bench, and she put her hand on his arm, her forehead creased in an expression of concern.

  The week after that, she travelled to Leipzig where she was due to lecture on Brecht. She was away for nearly a week, and George started to wonder whether she would have found a new protégé or whether, immersed in her routine, she would think that she had given him enough of her time. But the opposite was true. On her return she sent him a note asking him to dinner at her apartment in Pankow, and that night they made love for the first time.

  During the act Silke was soft and passionate, clinging to him with every ounce of her strength and raking his back and shoulders with her fingernails so badly that he felt the sting for days as the cuts healed. Afterwards she sat naked on the side of the bed and talked about herself. She was a Berliner, born in the aftermath of the war. Her father had died soon after. Strangely, at this point, she laughed. Like many of that generation, she said, there was a little mystery about the dates of her birth and her father’s death. It wasn’t the same, she continued, but she understood how George must feel about his divided parentage. She crossed her arms over her breasts and looked down at him, her features shadowed and enigmatic in the twilight bedroom. Her husband, she told him, had been another professor, a distinguished sociologist, who had received permission to attend a conference in Austria six months ago. He had never returned, and she had heard nothing. In any case, as a senior academic she was officially classified as Geheimnisträger, someone who knew state secrets, and it was forbidden to communicate with a defector, but it was common knowledge that he was now on the staff of the Sorbonne. He had always been fascinated by Paris, but his defection made her life more difficult than it had been. Everything she did might be under scrutiny. Perhaps, she said, George should be careful about being in her company, because it might create more problems for him.

  ‘I didn’t mean this to happen,’ she said. George curled his fingers round the soft flesh behind her knee and pulled her towards him, but she resisted for a moment, finishing her sentence. ‘But now it has it would be wise to be discreet and silent. Do you understand?’

  She stared into his eyes, pressing her hand down on his chest to keep him pinned down, until he nodded his head in acquiescence.

  ‘Of course.’

  Suddenly inspiration struck him. He threw the sheet aside and holding his penis, he waggled it at her. ‘Schultüte!’ he called out. In his mind was the present he had received like all little children in the republic received on their first day at school, a cone filled with sweets and tiny presents, and hearing the word, Silke gasped with laughter, then giggling uncontrollably threw herself on him.

  After a couple of months George had more or less forgotten his anxiety about Liebl, along with his guilt about deceiving Silke. She knew, he reasoned, that she would be under surveillance and she was safe enough, because as far as he could tell she was not engaged in subversive activities of any sort. For instance, when, urged by Liebl, he showed her a copy of the banned magazine Sputnik, she merely looked at it and handed it back to him, with the comment that it was hardly literature. There was nothing to report, he told Liebl, secretly amused at the thought of so much official effort being expended for so little reason.

  In later years, he sometimes woke in the night, sweating, groaning and berating himself for having been so naïve.

  ‘I admire her,’ he told Liebl recklessly. ‘She believes in the ideals of the republic, and she’s more brilliant than anyone I ever met.’

  This was true. In the time he had known Silke he felt that he had learnt more than he ever had during his entire life. She talked about politics and culture in a way that he’d never heard, not grumbling about the shops or the size of her apartment. Instead she talked about time, and beauty and ugliness, and the work of her friends who were artists and writers. The only woman to whom he had ever listened with comparable attention was his mother, and sometimes, lying in bed with Silke, he thought he was feeling something of the sweet warmth he had known as a small child.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right about her brilliance,’ Liebl said dryly, ‘but I don’t know anything about ideals.’

  The end when it came was even worse for being unexpected. George turned up at Silke’s apartment as he often did when he knew that she wasn’t otherwise engaged. She opened the door, but instead of smiling or embracing him, she led the way, stern-faced, into the room where she usually sat at her desk, writing or reading in the pool of light cast by the lamp in front of her.

  Sometimes he used to wake and find the bed empty, and looking in through the doorway he would see her profile, set and calm as she turned the pages of the book she was holding. Hearing him behind her, she would turn and smile.

  On this occasion, however, the books and papers which usually littered her desk lay scattered on the floor, as if she had swept them away in one violent motion. In their place were several rows of photographs, laid out under the light as if she had been examining them carefully one by one. At first, looking at the shapes, George couldn’t work out what they represented, then he realised that they were pictures of himself and Silke. Some of them were fuzzy and blurred, others sharp and clear, the difference, he assumed, was in the amount of light that was available. A few had been taken out of doors, and although they had never risked any intimate gestures in public, the camera had caught them touching or gazing into each other’s eyes with a warmth that spoke volumes. The bulk of the photos had been taken indoors, in Silke’s bedroom by a hidden camera, he supposed. Some had been taken at his small apartment, the furniture around them clearly recognisable. All of them were harshly outlined, the naked flesh giving the postures in which they were entwined an obscenity which startled him. In that moment he was, above all, surprised to see how it looked, Silke sprawled in front of him, his semen spurting on her skin, his buttocks poised, her mouth open in what looked like a scream. The photographs were dirty, ugly, with none of the charm or beauty of the experiences they depicted. All the camera registered was what they had done.

  George, without knowing what he was saying, began to stammer something.

  ‘Don’t both
er to lie,’ Silke said sharply. ‘Your friends told me. This was why they sent you. You’ve done your job.’ She took a rapid intake of ragged breath. ‘I don’t blame you. Better men have done worse. But you don’t know what you’ve done.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ George told her. His brain felt numb, and he couldn’t look at her for fear of seeing the revulsion he knew would be in her eyes.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she replied. ‘I just wanted you to see these. Now go. Never speak to me again. Go.’

  George’s head roared, swelling with pain as if it was about to burst. He went straight to Liebl’s office at the university. He had never been there before, neither of them wanting to be seen together. But now George climbed the stairs, rendered oblivious to consequence by the grief and anger tearing at his insides. It was already late in the evening and the place of the receptionist had been taken by two uniformed guards lolling in the outer office. George ignored them, and without knocking, opened the door of Liebl’s sanctum. On his way up the stairs he hadn’t known what he would do. In his mind was an image of himself punching Liebl to the ground and kicking his soft flesh until it gave way under his feet, but when he entered and saw the man sitting behind the desk, he hesitated.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ Liebl said. He waved away the guard who had followed George in. ‘Sit down.’

  George ignored the invitation. Instead he leant on the desk, thrusting his face out towards Liebl.

  ‘Why?’ he asked. He couldn’t trust himself to say more because he could feel his voice rising, and with another word, he knew, he would begin to shout, and then perhaps he would throw himself across the space between them.

  ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you,’ Liebl said. ‘I didn’t make this choice. Understand that. I followed orders, just like you.’

  ‘Don’t say that to me,’ George told him.

  ‘Okay. Sit down and listen to me.’

  George sat down, but he still leant forward on the desk, his eyes fixed on Liebl as if his limbs were locked into position, incapable of moving any further.

  ‘She was about to leave. Her plan was to go through Yugoslavia. Those swine send people like her on to the West without thinking twice. From there she was going to join the professor in Paris. She already had a contract to publish three of her books in the West, translated into English and French and any other language that would bring a profit. We knew about this a long time ago.’ He paused. ‘Politics. We couldn’t arrest her, because our bosses wanted her to stay here. They don’t like it when the heroes of our culture skip. No one cares if some mechanic from Saxony goes over the Wall, but Professor Elsner.’ He spread his hands. ‘Arrest her and the Wessis would have bought her out. We’d have asked for a couple of million deutschmarks and they’d have paid it. She knew also that if Yugoslavia failed she had that option. Certain people didn’t want that scandal to happen.’

  Everyone knew that the government sold political prisoners for a price – 50,000 deutschmarks for a teacher, 200,000 for a doctor. Elsner would have fetched ten times the amount, but that would have been a clear defeat for Stasi public relations.

  Liebl leant back in his chair, watching George as if gauging the effect of his words.

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ George said furiously. ‘Lies are your business.’

  Liebl picked up a thin cardboard file lying in front of him and handed it to George. There were two documents in it. They were photocopies, but the print was clear and George had no difficulty making them out. The first was a contract from a publisher with an address in Frankfurt. He recognised the signature immediately. The second, a single sheet of paper, was unsigned, but reading it, he knew who had written the letter. This was Silke, writing to her lover, the professor who had defected. In the letter she promised undying love and talked of her eagerness to rejoin him. From the first sentence George recognised her turn of phrase and even some of the words she used. They were the same endearments she had used with him.

  ‘You wrote this yourself,’ George said, throwing it back across the desk.

  ‘Where do you think those papers came from?’ Liebl asked him seriously. ‘Do you imagine she left them lying around in her apartment?’

  George guessed it all now. Once Liebl’s bosses had got wind of the contract they had used the photographs to win over Silke’s professor.

  ‘We needed something,’ Liebl said, ‘that would open his mouth, and we needed an argument to persuade her. She will stay. She wasn’t totally corrupted.’

  The defector, George assumed, had rejected her after seeing the photographs. Remembering the impression they had made on him he didn’t find that hard to imagine. He couldn’t guess what methods Liebl’s colleagues had used in persuading Silke to stay, but he supposed that they had used the threat of wider exposure and playing on her sense of shame and guilt.

  ‘Don’t blame us alone,’ Liebl continued. ‘She lied to you. One morning you would have woken up and found your training partner gone without a word. In the West she would have been drinking champagne and driving around in furs without one thought of you.’

  George didn’t believe that. He wondered whether she had been trying to warn him on that first night, but the idea increased his misery.

  ‘I’m telling you this, because I want you to remember that we’re walking the same road, working for socialism. There was no betrayal. It was she who planned to betray us to the gang of cosmopolitan intellectuals.’

  That was the end of it, but it was months before George could bring himself to reply to Liebl’s enquiries. The fat man didn’t bother to issue any threats or promises. Later on, George understood that Liebl knew he could afford to be patient, and like a fat spider he simply waited for his victim’s rage to cool down. George caught glimpses of Elsner from time to time, but he never tried to speak to her. Over the next year he acquired a rapidly changing string of girlfriends, moving from Heike to Grete to Elke to Marianne to Birgit to Regine and Renate, before finally settling on Radka. In that time he had succeeded in expelling from his mind the image of Silke’s face, set and grim, her light green eyes piercing him like arrows of contempt. He hadn’t even heard her name for almost all that time when he bumped into Gisela in the courtyard of the Gethsemanekirche on the night the Wall came down.

  ‘Have you heard about Elsner?’ she asked. Her voice was innocent of intent.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She drowned. She went swimming in Rügen, and disappeared. They thought maybe she’d got away to Sweden, then they found her body.’

  He barely had time to register his shock before a surge of the crowd carried her away. The next thing he knew he was marching along the Schönhauser Allee sandwiched in between Radka and Renate. The next time he saw Liebl, waddling along the Friedrichstrasse, a bulging briefcase in his hand, his appearance that of a man in flight, he told him without greeting or preamble that he ought to kill him.

  Liebl had merely smiled his fat man’s smile.

  ‘You won’t do that,’ he said, before turning away.

  It had been twelve years ago, but George felt the rage rising in him again as he thought about the way that Liebl had smiled the same smile while he sat watching him spraying food over the table. By the time he finished telling Valentin as much of the story as he could bear to repeat, the sun had disappeared. Behind them the river seemed to be chuckling softly.

  ‘Fuck him,’ Valentin said. ‘We make no deals with this pig.’

  ‘So what do we do now? Sooner or later they’ll find it. Or they’ll get to us somehow.’

  Valentin clasped his hands together. He gave a grunt of impatience. George recognised his mood. Valentin hated the stasis of indecision. Stuck at a crossroads he would always choose, rather than sit around trying to figure out the puzzle.

  ‘First thing,’ he said, ‘if they’re looking for Victor’s treasure it’s only a matter of time before they find it.’

  George shrugged.

  ‘That’s not our
problem. We put all that behind us.’

  Valentin looked at him sharply.

  ‘This is different.’ He used an American expression with a touch of pride: ‘We’re in a new ball game. They’ll get to us sooner or later, but I don’t care about that. We’re Victor’s partners, we can’t leave him to fight this battle alone.’

  Seeing the glitter in Valentin’s eyes, George remembered his cousin talking about the feelings he shared with Victor about their experience as soldiers. Perhaps he should have listened more carefully.

  ‘What can we do?’

  Valentin grinned.

  ‘Plenty. We can help Victor move the treasure and hide it somewhere else in another country. In Russia too many people know of it. I’ll speak with Victor tonight. Then we do it. Afterwards we think about what to do with these animals. If they come, we’ll be ready.’