Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  It was a haphazard and disordered occasion. Evelyne alone remained sober that night, observing us all through a haze of tobacco smoke. That was when I first saw her as an attractive young woman. Medium height, slim, short blond hair and exquisitely carved. Her breasts were not voluptuous like Helge’s, but small and firm. Overlooking them was a pair of sharp blue eyes and an intelligent, angular face.

  A week later we made love for the first time in a tiny apartment overlooking the old Jewish cemetery. It belonged to her aunt, who was never at home during the afternoon. For a few months we shared everything: experiences, confidences, worries, fantasies and dreams. Our love grew like a wild rose. We would walk to the park and sit on the grass, holding hands and kissing like nervous adolescents. Just when I was thinking seriously of telling your mother, the affair died suddenly. What had pruned it out of existence? On my side, I guess, it was the knife of reason. One afternoon I couldn’t take her. She was mocking and cynical.

  ‘My stock is clearly going down and yours is refusing to rise. I think we’ve exhausted each other. Time to move on. You look surprised, Vlady. You’re not bad-looking for your age. I was into you because of your acid tongue. You were different from the other robots at Humboldt. You used to make me laugh. I never intended a long stay at your station, you old fool. Anyway your signals need repairing and you need a more experienced engineer than me.’

  I thought then that she was driven by pure ambition. Her overriding need to change lovers was determined by which of them could help further her career. I had introduced her to a film-director acquaintance and had seen her at work on him. I had no doubt that he would replace me. He did.

  Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps she had simply outgrown me, moving to a different phase of her life. I had spent a lot of time on her compositions, making critical notes and compelling her to rewrite and rewrite till I thought she could do no better. It was I who had read her short stories and poems. It was I who had noted she had a good ear for dialogue and pushed her in the direction of writing film scripts.

  A few days after we had ended our affair, I saw her on the street with the film director. I behaved badly. I disrupted their talk and dragged her away. Her reaction indicated that it really was all over. She poured scorn on me. Hatred flowed out of her like molten lava. She threatened to ring Helge. Then she walked away. I was embittered. I felt I had been exploited. I wanted to confront her once again, but she had disappeared. She and the film director had fled to the West. One of her friends told me she had settled in Heidelberg.

  It seemed pointless to tell your mother anything. It was over. But someone had recorded the episode. Unknown to me or Evelyne our summer trysts in the park had attracted the attention of Leyla, a Turkish painter from Kreuzberg who had been commissioned to paint a set of East Berlin landscapes. Her portrait of us had a surrealist flavour. We were buried deep in an illicit embrace in the park. She had entitled her painting Stolen Kisses.

  Many months passed. Evelyne was happily ensconced in my unconscious. One day there was a rainstorm. Your mother, desperate for shelter, entered an art gallery. A coincidence, of course, but what wretched luck. She saw the painting, pierced through the surrealist mask, recognized me and questioned Leyla with some intensity.

  Helge could not afford to buy the painting, but Leyla, observing her distress, gave it to her. When the exhibition was over, Helge brought the painting back to our apartment. A hurricane swept through our relationship. I am shuddering as I write this, Karl. It was a horrible day. Our relationship was probably doomed, but Stolen Kisses sealed its fate. She took the painting with her when she left, informing me that though the subject made her nauseous she really liked the composition and had become good friends with Leyla.

  There are times in life when a single setback encourages another, like a small, dislodged rock triggers an avalanche. A month later I met Klaus Winter for lunch and he informed me that the State Security was getting regular and detailed reports from the leadership meetings of our Forum for German Democracy. He repeated verbatim remarks that had been attributed to me. His report was completely accurate. That was when Winter told me that he was a senior figure in Foreign Intelligence and that Gertrude, your grandmother, and he had both worked for Soviet Military Intelligence since the late twenties. After the Second World War they had been assigned to the DDR intelligence services.

  I was thunderstruck, Karl. I had no idea that Gertrude was still involved in all that stuff. She had left no trace of it in her papers. I did not let Winter see the effect of the blow he had dealt me. Gertrude had encouraged the formation of our Forum. She had actually helped me write our founding document. She had attended some of our meetings. I had discussed our innermost secrets with her, including a plan to steal documents from the Politburo, since one of our supporters worked in that building.

  As I walked away from Winter’s apartment, I wondered how much Gertrude had told Winter. Everything? Nothing? A few bits and pieces? In which case why had they not arrested us and disbanded the Forum? They could have done it very easily. Perhaps they had reported directly to Moscow and the men around Gorbachev had counselled them to let us grow.

  I wanted answers, but before I was ready to confront Winter I had to discover the real Gertrude and the ghosts that had possessed her. She was dead. I had to piece together the disparate strands that had made up her life. How had it interrelated with that of Ludwik? When did she first meet Winter and where? And who was she in the first place? Her life was now beginning to haunt me.

  I remember, not long before she died, you asking her whether she had any photographs of her family. I used to ask her that when I was a child and she would shake her head quickly and change the subject. When you asked her, she began to cry. Do you remember? Do you know why, Karl? Because she had left home in such a state that all relations between her and the family were broken.

  Gertrude’s parents were third-generation German Jews. Her grandfather, who had done well in the tea and caviar trade, had built a large mansion in Schwaben, then a fashionable Munich suburb. Most of those old houses have long since been destroyed. Not by the war, but by developers.

  Gertrude’s father was a greatly respected physician. Her mother led a life of leisure. Neither of them was religious. If anything, young Gertie and her brother Heinrich learned about religion from their cook and the two maids, all of whom were good Catholics.

  Her childhood was happy. She would talk sometimes of the big garden at the end of which was a little gate that led to a small forest where she and Heinrich used to pick wild strawberries every summer. There was an old cedar tree and a swing. She used to delight in pushing Heinrich higher and higher till he was screaming, half in fear and half delight. The maid would rush from the house and rescue the little boy.

  They were brought up like any other Germans of their class and generation. At the gymnasium she was punished for her insolence for refusing to accept the casual anti-Semitism of her history teacher. The head of the gymnasium wrote a strong letter to her father. Dr Meyer refused to take the matter seriously.

  ‘They are ignorant, Gertie,’ her father would tell her. ‘To show anger is to come down to their level. You must learn to control yourself.’

  ‘If he is ignorant,’ she responded, ‘why is he permitted to teach us history?’

  Her father would smile and finger his beard, but could not reply. When she recalled all this her eyes would light up. It was the first time she had won an argument.

  ‘I have no answer to your question, Gertie. May I simply recommend that you learn what they teach, pass your exams and prepare to enter the university. Do you think I could have become a physician if I had responded to every insult or curse? Anti-Semitism is strongly rooted in their culture. They imbibed it with Christianity. Luther made that side of it only worse, but it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all.’

  Gertie did pass her exams, but during her very first year at the University of Munich she fell in love with a fellow-stud
ent with the name of David Stein. There is a photograph of them as students, which I found as I was going through her papers a few months ago.

  He was of medium height, with a shock of dark red hair and twinkling eyes. The son of a railway worker, he was a rarity at the university and the object of a great deal of prejudice. A Jew, and from a poor family.

  Gertie was impressed by his remarkable self-confidence and his ability to rise above the jibes to which he was continuously subjected. This might seem strange to you, Karl, but don’t forget that the German universities were the strongholds of reaction. Long before Hitler became Chancellor, his ideas had already triumphed in the universities.

  Stein was a brilliant mathematician and Gertie always felt that if she had not distracted him, he would have easily reached the pinnacle of his profession. Perhaps, but had fate not intervened in the shape of your grandmother, he might just as easily have ended up in Auschwitz.

  The two of them became inseparable. Slowly they began to explore each other’s emotions and bodies. Together they flouted Jewish orthodoxy. Gertie’s household may have been secular in every way, but the kitchen was never defiled by pig meat. David’s parents were staunch atheists. They were both active in the Social Democratic Party. Here too, the old taboo against pork was strictly observed.

  David and Gertie cemented their love by walking into a non-Jewish butcher’s shop and buying some cooked ham. They walked to the old Jewish cemetery, sat on the grave of David’s grandfather and consumed the ham. Once they had finished, they appealed to the Creator to prove his existence by striking them dead. The sky remained still. The excitement proved too much for Gertie. She vomited in the street, but as David helped to clean her mouth they both began to laugh. They had cured themselves of all superstitions forever. It was only after this episode that David had dragged her off to meet his parents.

  The Steins lived in a two-room basement with a tiny kitchen. A fading portrait of Eduard Bernstein was pinned to the wall. How times change, Karl. In those days Bernstein was regarded as the father of revisionist thought. A turncoat. A reactionary who had made his peace with the class enemy. Twenty years ago, this view was still widely held. Read a few of his essays now, Karl, and compare them to the speeches you write for your new Social Democratic masters. Bernstein now seems to be a die-hard, a dinosaur no less! Of course, times have changed. Why do I keep forgetting this fact?

  Next to Bernstein’s portrait was a framed sepia-tinted photograph of David’s father and six other men, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, with watch-chains proudly displayed. This was the executive of the Munich railway workers’ union. Gertie was awed by David’s father. She became a regular visitor. The only subject of conversation in the kitchen was socialist politics. David’s father was one of the local leaders of the SDP, but he was entirely devoid of self-importance. He spoke softly and was always prepared to listen to his political opponents, whose numbers were growing within the railway workers’ union.

  It was 1918. Germany had been dismembered by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky were in power in Petrograd and Moscow. Ferment was sweeping through Europe. The Kaiser had been toppled and the Prussian Junkers were talking to Social Democrats, seeing them as the only way to avoid the German revolution.

  Finally the day came when Gertie felt she had to take David home. If they were going to get married she had to introduce him to her parents. Aware of the polar contrast between the two households, she was dreading the occasion. Gertie’s parents did not even attempt to conceal their shock. David’s twinkling, intelligent eyes made no impact on them. They were horrified at the thought of their daughter marrying a penniless pauper, whose parents were probably recent arrivals from the steel.

  They saw a totally different David. A young man in patched trousers and tattered shoes. Gertie had prevented him from wearing his only suit. They noticed that he spoke in plebeian accents and, worst of all, was not in the least embarrassed by his poverty. The kindly Dr Meyer and his even kinder wife decided that the boy was cheeky. What they really meant by this was that David was not deferential. They decided to teach him the rudiments of civilized behaviour by subjecting him to an insolent inquisition. Who were his parents? Where were they from? Was his father a socialist? Where did they live? How large was their apartment? How had David got into the university?

  Gertrude was horrified. She could not see that her parents were simply expressing a fear of the other and worried about losing their daughter. She saw it as a display of decadent, bourgeois philistinism. She told me that it was a side of her parents that she had, till then, sought to ignore and repress.

  David registered only mild amusement. He had replied to each and every query with impeccable dignity, while simultaneously trying to warn Gertie with his eyes to calm down and avoid a tantrum at all costs. It was no use. Your grandmother was too far gone by that stage. She was livid. Ashamed of her parents, ashamed of their house, ashamed at the presence of uniformed maids, who couldn’t keep their eyes off David, and ashamed of herself for belonging to the Meyer family.

  She never asked David to visit her again. Instead, she began to spend more and more time with his family. It was in the Stein basement, where she spent most of the days of her vacation that December, that Gertie learnt of the significance of the Russian Revolution.

  David’s father thought that Lenin was fine for Russia, which had no tradition of political parties and trade unions, but not for Germany. He had little time for the revolutionaries of the Spartakusbund who had split the great German Social Democratic Party, accusing even Karl Kautsky of treachery. When David pointed out that the great German party had voted war credits to the Kaiser while the Russian party had not simply refused to support the Tsar, but had instead suggested to the workers that their real enemy was at home, his father nodded sadly. He, too, had been unhappy with the SPD policy of supporting the war, but he remained adamant on the other question. Germany was not prepared for Lenin’s revolution. The old tried and tested methods of the German party were the only hope.

  ‘There is an old German proverb,’ Herr Stein told David and Gertie one evening. ‘A silk hat is indeed very fine, provided only that I had mine. But Karl and Rosa are a long way off yet …’ For Herr Stein, the Spartacists lived in an unreal world.

  David, not wishing to upset his parents, had refrained from telling his father that he and Gertie had started attending Spartacist study classes in Munich. This was not so much because of their differences. David knew how much his parents had sacrificed in order to educate him. They would be worried that his new-found interest in politics would take him away from the university and his career.

  When, a month later, in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by the Freikorps in Berlin, the whole Stein family went into mourning. Did you know, Karl, that one of the officers involved in the murder was a man called Canaris, later Hitler’s admiral and someone greatly admired by certain Western leaders during the war? They thought they could have done business with him. They were right.

  David’s father wept loudly as he shook his head. He was sad and angry. He had heard Rosa and Liebknecht speak at many meetings before the outbreak of war. He had raised funds for them when they were imprisoned for opposing the war, but despite his admiration for the slain revolutionaries, he still could not defend their decision to launch an uprising.

  ‘Crazy dreamers,’ he told David and Gertie while the tears were still pouring down his face. ‘That’s what they were. The workers will miss them in the years to come. Rosa should have known better. We have to act now. We can’t sit still. If we don’t move, the Junkers will kill us all. Spartacists, Independents, Social Democrats. We’re all the same for them.’

  David embraced his father, but did not speak. Old Stein was wrong. The Junkers knew the difference between the groups only too well. And Field Marshal von Hindenberg knew that in Friedrich Ebert, he had found a German patriot who would not flinch from the task that confront
ed him. Without the support of the Social Democrat leaders, Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann, the Junkers could not have drowned the Berlin uprising in blood.

  Perhaps, Karl, you should persuade the Ebert Foundation to fund a commemoration of the uprising and the murders in 2018. Your SPD can claim that Ebert is the Father of German Democracy. My PDS, if it is still there, will argue that the Berlin tragedy of 1918-19 paved the way for the catastrophe of 1933. Engels once remarked, in a letter to a friend, that history is the result of conflicts of many individual wills, who have been affected in different ways by a host of particular conditions of life. The final result is often something that no one willed. As a general statement I think he’s right, but Hindenberg and Ebert wanted to crush the revolution in Berlin. And they did.

  So you see, Karl, my century began with a tragedy and is ending on the same note. Our generation was brought up on stories of how it might have all been different if the revolution had triumphed in Berlin. You might think I’m still trying desperately to cling on to something, to anything, even if it is just the debris of failed revolutions. You might even be right but, if only for a few minutes, forget I’m your father. Let me assume the guise of a professor of comparative literature and suggest that you read one of the great novelists of this century.

  Even though Alfred Döblin was not a favoured author of the DDR commissars, I often used him in my lectures at Humboldt. I read passages from his works and had the following proposition by him put up in large type on my noticeboard:

  The subject of a novel is reality unchained, reality that confronts the reader completely independently of some firmly fixed course of events. It is the reader’s task to judge, not the author’s! To speak of a novel is to speak of layering, of piling in heaps, of wallowing, of pushing and shoving. A drama is about its poor plot, its desperately ever-present plot. In drama it is always ‘forward!’ But ‘forward’ is never the slogan of a novel.