Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  Elections never happened in Vietnam. Why? Because the Americans, who had replaced the French, were scared that the Communists would win. The Third Vietnam War began. Thu Van, whose knowledge of the terrain in the south made her invaluable, left her young son and husband in Hanoi to join the newly organized National Liberation Front in the south.

  ‘You must eat properly while I’m away, Sao. When you were a baby you were plump and round like a sweet flour candy. Look at you now. A scarecrow! Promise me you’ll eat your meals.’

  Sao had promised and she had lifted him off the ground and kissed his eyes. Her own eyes had filled with tears. As she bade farewell to her husband and son something told her she wouldn’t see them again.

  ‘Look after him well,’ she whispered in his ear.

  She was killed a few months later in 1962, during the battle of Ap Bac, when the Americans suffered their first serious reversal. The encounter itself was minor, but in it was written the war’s future.

  One day young Sao came into the dirty barber’s shop in Haiphong where his father now worked and where the main customers were sailors on leave. It was late and there were no customers. Sao looked into the blinded mirror. His father’s intense gaze suddenly gave way to tears. Sao hugged him quietly.

  ‘The Americans are really stupid,’ Sao’s father said in a soft voice which indicated that he had been thinking of Thu Van. ‘Can’t they see that if the French couldn’t beat us, nobody will?’

  Sao always carried a photograph of his mother with him. It was one of those formal photographs designed for posterity and political propaganda. She was dressed in black pyjamas, a straw hat and was carrying a rifle. Her face, full of hope, was wreathed in smiles. It was the last photograph ever taken of her and he had carried it on him all his life. When he went to join the struggle he had shown it with pride to his comrades.

  How could she have been so full of hope? Sao envied her this more than anything else. His world was the settled, comfortable one of a wealthy man, but it was devoid of an apocalyptic view of the future.

  He was now completely dry. He picked up his watch, realized he was getting late and began to dress quickly. Just as he was putting his wallet in the inside pocket of his jacket, the phone rang. He let it ring for a few seconds while he tied his shoelaces.

  ‘Excuse me, Herr Sao, there is a Professor Meyer waiting for you in reception.’

  ‘Send him up, send him up,’ said Sao excitedly as he laughed and threaded his gold cufflinks.

  Vlady had walked to the Ku-Damm and the cold wind had given his cheeks a gentle flush. He felt refreshed, more alert in mind and body. As the lift ascended to the penthouse floor, Vlady smiled as he thought of the changes of the last decade that had transformed Sao’s life and his own since the night of their accidental meeting in Dresden, in the old DDR, nearly twelve years ago.

  Sao was waiting outside the open door of his room. The two friends embraced.

  ‘My first question to you, Professor,’ Sao spoke with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. ‘Are the workers contented now?’

  Both men laughed.

  ‘Not all workers can live like you, Sao.’

  ‘That is a pity,’ laughed the Vietnamese as they descended to the ground floor and headed towards the Lobster Bar. He ordered caviar, lobster and champagne, while bemoaning that the seafood in Halong Bay was much superior. Vlady contented himself with a steak and salad. Two good meals in two days. His stock must be rising in this new world.

  Later, back in Sao’s suite, they shared a bottle of cognac and Sao, feeling maudlin, offered his friend money, a flat in Berlin or Paris, an institute of his own in Dresden, a new publishing house in Munich or Vienna or, indeed, anything else that Vlady desired.

  Vlady smiled gratefully, but shook his head.

  ‘Listen to me carefully, Vlady. You saved my life. Can I ever forget? Now I am rich. More money than I ever dreamt of. My children, my wife will have enough after I am gone. The money still keeps coming. I want to help you. What’s the problem, Vlady? A moral dilemma? Yes? Why?’

  Vlady was touched and his expression softened.

  ‘The dilemma is existential, not moral. How to live is far less important a question than whether to live. Gerhard resolved the problem by hanging himself in his garden in Jena, but I …’

  ‘But not you, Vladimir Meyer.’ Sao gripped his friend’s arm as if he were a prisoner of war. ‘Not you. I will not, I cannot believe that you can just give up. So you’ve been sacked by a bunch of bastards from the West. Fight back with both fists. I’ll fund your counterattack. Remember the line from Brecht you taught me so many years ago: “Were a wind to arise I could put up a sail; were there no sail I’d make one of canvas and sticks.”’

  Vlady smiled.

  ‘Not only is there no wind, but the whole sea is occupied by giant ships with only one shanty to sing. Not Brecht, but “Deutschmark, deutschmark uber alles”. The reunification has gone to their head, Sao. Do you know what some of them are saying? Unless we grow even greater, we shall become less.’

  Sao grinned, pleased to see Vlady angry again. ‘What about the snails?’ he asked, referring to the SPD. ‘Young Karl is doing well, which is good for me. If I have a friend in the Chancellery my business will prosper even more. You just calm down, Vlady. The new Germany is not an embryo of a Fourth Reich. Some idiots may dream of that, but the German bourgeoisie will not make the same mistake twice. Never. I’m sure the SPD will win again.’

  ‘Not for some time. They need a brain transplant to halt the decline. But enough of dead politics and living-dead politicians. I want to know where your money is coming from, Sao. And I want the truth.’

  Sao smiled. ‘You mean you’ve forgotten? I told you everything. About myself, my family, my money. Everything. Remember the week we spent together. The week before reunification. You have forgotten. You were very drunk on freedom and democracy. My life story, by contrast, seemed insignificant. Never mind. You were right. It is insignificant. Vlady, I must go next door and call the West Coast. Business. I won’t be long. Have some more cognac. There are many things I have to tell you.’

  Vlady was indignant. He looked at his watch. Thirty-seven minutes past midnight.

  ‘You can make your filthy phone calls later. First I want the truth. And, by the way, I’ve forgotten nothing. It’s just that your life story has acquired a new instalment. Am I right or wrong?’

  Sao settled back in his chair again and sighed. ‘Well?’ said the Vietnamese, refilling his glass.

  ‘I still want my answer, Sao. Where’s it all coming from now? Drugs or weapons?’

  The two men looked at each other. Vlady saw a troubled look cross his friend’s eyes. Then an oppressive silence. After what seemed an eternity, Sao began to talk.

  ‘I could never be involved with drugs, Vlady. Never. Though it is true that my former partners holiday a great deal in Pakistan and Colombia. Not me, Vlady, not me.’

  ‘So you’re gun-running?’

  ‘Gun-running?’ Sao roared with laughter. ‘So old-fashioned, Vlady. Tank-running, missile-running, fighter-aircraft-running, yes. Gun running, no! I buy and sell. The Chinese want missiles. I fly to Alma Ata and do a deal with the Kazakhs. The Serbs want tanks. Iraq needs spare parts for its MIG fighters. I make sure they get them. Supply and demand, Vlady. Market rules. The capitalism you hate so much has conquered the world.’

  ‘Your world, perhaps, but there is another world out there, Sao.’ Vlady was trying hard to keep the bitter edge out of his voice. ‘It may be submerged for a while, but it will rise again. I’m amazed that you, of all people could forget. After all the sacrifices made by ordinary people.’

  ‘When the sands run against people, the people they should go away. Old Chinese proverb, Vlady. Sacrifices? We Vietnamese know more about that than anyone else. I joined the Communist Youth Brigade in Hanoi when I was sixteen. A year later I was fighting in the south. I saw all my close comrades die. I was given up for dead myse
lf. I only survived because a peasant family scavenging for valuables saw I was still breathing. They took me in and informed the nearest NLF* unit. I was taken to a hospital in Cambodia, but returned to see the fall of Saigon. We deserved that victory, did we not? Sacrifices!

  ‘I sometimes wonder whether it was worth it. We lost two million people, Vlady. What for? To build a better future? Even children don’t believe that now, and few teachers think it worth repeating. I remember when I was twelve years old. Our towns and villages were being bombed day and night by American planes. We used to be so proud when our teacher marked our homework in downed US warplanes. So proud, Vlady. Why were we so proud and even happy, despite the deaths and destruction? We believed in something. It wasn’t because we thought we’d end up as slave labourers in the old Eastern Europe, let alone the new world market. I mean, if we’d known that it would end like this, we could have done a deal with Washington a long time before 1975.

  ‘All the speculators and parasites who fled with the Americans are slowly coming back, the same exploiters we fought against for thirty years. So I ask you: Was it worth it?’

  Vlady, realizing that no glib rebuttal was possible, decided to return to the offensive. ‘What about plutonium-running, Sao? Surely you have no moral inhibitions? I mean if the market rules, then why not supply plutonium when there is clearly a big demand? Give everyone the bomb!’

  ‘You’re angry, my friend. Please, Vlady, don’t misunderstand me deliberately. I am not a freak or a monster. I work to live and I live well. That’s all. Would it have made you happier if I’d returned to Hanoi or Hue and opened a small book shop or become a party bureaucrat or a pimp or a street vendor? Don’t tell me there’s no living space in between soiling your hands and cutting your throat. And no, my friend, I don’t trade in plutonium or chemical weapons. My arms business is strictly non-nuclear and non-chemical.’

  Vlady gave him a cold stare.

  ‘Do you believe me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vlady replied. He felt strongly that Sao was telling the truth. ‘But why are you here at the moment?’

  ‘The old Red Army’s still here, isn’t it? The generals want to sell. I want to buy. There is a large order from Iraq. Payment is in dollars. At least one Russian general will be staying on in Berlin. That much I promise you.’

  Sao stopped suddenly. His friend was far away. Vlady was wondering whether anything that had happened this century had been worth the trouble. The Russian Revolution and the epic resistance of the Vietnamese had finally ended up prostrate before the New York Stock Exchange. He was computing the lives that had been lost in Russia, when Sao’s voice interrupted him.

  ‘Now I’ve told you everything, Vlady. Why don’t you let me buy you a publishing house? No? Books are now a commodity, just like tinned salmon. Do you want to go and live in the States, like your friend, Christa Wolf? Yes? It could be arranged. I have friends at the University of California.’

  ‘No! Christa was hounded out, you sonofabitch. She was fine for them while the DDR was alive. They needed her then. She was a noble savage. Now they have to destroy her in order to convince themselves that everything in the DDR was tainted. Everything. And this from men who hired ex-Nazis by the thousands to run their new state after the war. Nazi war heroes are still celebrated in the Luftwaffe. Everything they do here stinks of double standards.’

  ‘What are you going to do with your life, Vlady?’

  ‘I don’t know. One can carry on living in the present till one drops dead. Most people do that these days. For me it’s like living in a jungle. Gerhard, whom you knew, decided he could no longer live in these conditions. And you, Sao, have changed so much …’

  ‘You were never short of friends, Vlady.’

  ‘But friendship meant something in those days. Now one meets people and discards them like autumn trees shed leaves.’

  Sao smiled. He was partly fond of Vlady because he saw the absurdity of his political position. Absurd, but also admirable. Since Vlady had been expelled from his academic life and his dream of a non-western, non-Soviet East Germany had turned into a nightmare, it seemed to Sao that his friend had kept on fighting the dialectical battle that history had recently concluded. He could not tell Vlady that what he, Sao, wanted most of all was to smash the mirror Vlady kept gazing into only to peer further in the mirror behind him. He wanted Vlady to do the job himself.

  ‘Let me help, Vlady. Please.’

  A long pause followed before Vlady, after careful reflection, spoke again, but this time the tone was subdued. ‘There is one thing you can do for me, Sao.’

  Sao, who was lying on the sofa, sat up in surprise.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My father. I want to know how he died and who killed him. With your contacts in Moscow, could you get me his file from the KGB archives?’

  Sao grinned with pleasure. ‘Absolutely. The German mark can buy anything. These are times when whole cities are being bought and sold. All you want is pieces of paper. No problem at all. It is easier to buy history than real estate. The mafia is not interested in archives. I’ll get you whatever it is that you want. Give me the details. Do you have a photograph?’

  Vlady nodded.

  ‘Fine,’ said Sao. ‘Bring it to me tomorrow.’

  ‘If it’s that easy,’ said Vlady with a sigh, ‘could you get my mother’s file as well? Might as well have the whole story.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ Sao laughed, ‘and if you think of anyone else, let me know. And Vlady, please let me help you in other ways.’

  Vlady stood up and made a mock bow to Sao. ‘Till tomorrow.’

  Sao rose and hugged his friend. Vlady was gently disentangling himself from the embrace, when Sao whispered, ‘You saved my life once. Let me save yours.’

  Vlady’s eyes smiled and he gave a tiny nod. It was a gesture of gratitude. Then he left Sao’s room. Outside the Kempinski he surprised himself and took a taxi home. It was two-thirty in the morning. Inside his flat, Vlady undressed but he was gripped by a dull headache and sleep, cruel sleep, evaded him.

  He thought of his former colleagues in the former Soviet Union and the former Czechoslovakia. He had not heard from them for a long time. How many had fallen off the feverish merry-go-round that was the new Europe? Newly rich. Newly free. Could any of his old friends be in the vanguard of this repellent and chaotic fin de siècle? Or had they, like him, sought refuge from this spectacle and become internal exiles? The important thing was to survive. To cover one’s head with a blanket and wait till the polluted downpour was over.

  He now began to have second thoughts about his request to Sao. Did he really want to know more? Perhaps the past was better protected and preserved. What difference would it make if the man he regarded as his father now turned out to be someone completely different? What was the point of it all? It would change nothing. Yes, it would. It would end the painful torment of memory. The century was cursed, but he still wanted to know. Try as he might, he could not simply write off the past or completely cut himself away from the present. The contradictions in his head finally exhausted themselves. He fell asleep.

  _______________

  *National Liberation Front.

  Six

  THE YEAR IS 1913. Vienna, the capital of an empire on the eve of extinction, appears unchanged. Its citizens show no overt signs of panic. The New Year celebrations are as frothy as usual. The Strauss waltz maintains its popularity in bourgeois and plebeian circles. Schoenberg’s new music is heard by a small minority and appreciated only by a vanguard far removed from everyday realities. Or so it seems. The coming conflict between the Great Powers will change all this, but in belle époque Vienna the thoughts of the many do not entertain notions of a destructive war.

  Students from the outer reaches of the empire were still being admitted to the university. That’s how Ludwik met Lisa. Neither of them had celebrated their nineteenth birthday. She was sitting with friends in a cafe when he saw her features transformed by a s
mile and then heard the ring of a deep, throaty laugh. She had a strong, well-formed face, large forehead, raised cheekbones, piercing blue eyes and luxuriant, dark brown hair, bunched together in a bun. She was wearing a black dress and a silk scarf with a silver brooch.

  He was looking for someone else, but could not take his eyes away from her, till she caught his glance and frowned. At first sight he was not particularly attractive. He had nice eyes, but was a bit too short and plump. The perfectionist in her preferred slim and sculpted figures. His crop of black hair was already beginning to thin and she thought he would be bald in another few years, and turned away. Ludwik persisted. It was his voice that entranced her and it was when he spoke that she felt the force of his personality. Still she resisted. Still he would not accept defeat.

  They began an exhausting courtship, which seemed to last forever. It left them drained of energy and feelings at the end of each week. All the streets in Vienna acquired new meanings for him. They walked for hours, mute with emotion, each waiting for the other to break the silence till it was time to part and not a word had been spoken. Later he would replay the lost day in his mind and the streets would come to life again. Here she had laughed, there they had held hands and just as they had reached the Zentrale, another quarrel had erupted. Consumed with passion, he had been unable to eat anything, while she had ordered cakes with her coffee.

  He had declared his love for her in the very first week after they had met. She had resisted, her instincts warning her that this one could be overwhelming and dangerous. She told him that she did not and could never love him. His face had paled, but he had said nothing, just stood up and walked away.