Fear of Mirrors

by Tariq Ali

  ‘I have a son in Hanoi.’

  For a few seconds Vlady was stunned into silence.

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘And the mother?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A Vietnamese woman. I love her, Vlady.’

  ‘That does complicate matters. Let me reformulate my advice. I think you should spend most of your time in Hanoi and a few months every summer in what will by then have become Marie-Louise’s villa in Provence. That is, of course, if she still wishes to be friendly. Otherwise hang on to your apartment in Paris.’

  ‘Don’t be cynical.’

  ‘I’m being realistic, Sao.’

  ‘Do you think I should tell Marie-Louise now?’

  ‘Of course. Why delay the agony? You’ll feel much better.’

  ‘You never liked Marie-Louise. Did you Vlady?’

  ‘I only met her once.’

  ‘Answer my question.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was never convinced that she really cared for you. She was your secretary, Sao. You took her to Indochina on business trips. Showed her the sights, including the sight of your oversized Swiss bank accounts. What had to happen, happened. She first became your fucking secretary, then your wife. The pattern is not original. Of course, there are some cases where the new arrangement works beautifully.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong, Vlady. She was initially very reluctant. I had to work hard. I had to pursue her like…’

  ‘Like flies pursue dung.’

  ‘Vlady, you are being unfair to her.’

  ‘You’ve fathered a child in Hanoi. Fallen in love with its mother and I’m being unfair to your French wife. Please, Sao. Don’t lose your sense of perspective.’

  Sao started laughing. ‘You have cheered me up, you know. I wish I could fly to Berlin.’

  ‘Don’t be a coward, Sao. Go to Brittany, my friend, and make it your Dienbienphu.’

  ‘I love my children, Vlady.’

  ‘And they love your presents. Since they hardly ever see you, they can’t feel that close. But fathers who play Santa Claus throughout the year do become an obsession for their children, so I may be wrong. When you leave they will go crazy and want to live with you in Hanoi. It’s possible. Is your new love in Hanoi prepared to mother these two as well?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked her because the thought never occurred to me. I’m sure it will be fine.’

  ‘Good. Then off you go to Brittany.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love, Vlady? I mean really in love. Or is it still an abstract bourgeois concept?’

  ‘You’re a fool, Sao. I loved Helge. Still do.’

  ‘Then you know how I feel about Linh.’

  ‘So that’s her name.’

  ‘Yes. Even as I talk to you, Vlady, I can see her in front of me.’

  ‘Why have you never told me before?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t want you to think my relationship with Linh was sordid in any way and you might have … well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I do, and I think you’re a very big fool. You’d better go and catch your train to Brittany. Ring when you come back, and tell me how it all went. One more thing, Sao.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re still in the grip of the love disease. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then just wait a minute. I will read something out to you … Sao?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen to the song of the poet.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  Does the imagination dwell the most

  Upon a woman won or woman lost?

  If on the lost, admit you turned aside

  From a great labyrinth out of pride,

  Cowardice, some silly, over-subtle thought

  Or anything called conscience once;

  And that if memory recur, the sun’s

  Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

  ‘Brilliant, Vlady. Who is it? Brecht?’

  ‘No, no, no! It’s an Irish poet, Yeats.’

  ‘Do you think he’s been translated into Vietnamese?’

  ‘Not sure, but the Chinese translation is good.’

  ‘I will send Linh his collection in English. She will translate it into Vietnamese for our new publishing house.’

  ‘Sao! I order you to stop dreaming. To Brittany, my friend. Adieu.’

  ‘Ciao, Vlady, and thanks.’

  For several minutes, Sao did not move from the chair on which he had slumped while talking to Berlin. He was annoyed at Vlady’s suggestion that Marie-Louise had married him for his money. Vlady had no idea of the good times they had enjoyed together. He could not know of how well they had bonded in bed. Something was lacking in their relationship. Marie-Louise saw Sao as a successful businessman, nothing more. Sao felt that she never really understood the depth of his inner revulsion as far as his work was concerned. When he complained of the life that circumstances forced him to lead, she showed little sympathy. She had no idea what he was talking about. It was this that had led to an amicable divorce and an equally amicable financial settlement. Marie-Louise’s father had made sure that his daughter would live in comfort.

  Twenty-three

  I NEVER WANTED TO BE a dead-weight in your life, Karl. That’s the reason I deliberately kept you aloof from what had become a way of life for Helge and me. After we had founded the Committee for Democratic Germany (KDD), it was difficult to settle down to a normal existence. In the seventies my book, A Manifesto For a New Germany, had become an underground success, thought not as popular as Bahro’s The Alternative. I seemed to have developed an instinct for how far this wretched regime could be pushed – and it was always a little harder than people imagined.

  Our life became discontinuous even though the irregularities and dislocations tended to repeat themselves and a pattern began to emerge. Our lives seemed to be obeying cycles of chance, but were, in reality, acquiring an odd coherence. We became expert actors. Much to the surprise of my apolitical colleagues and students at Humboldt, I appeared to have changed. My behaviour, so they told me, had become much more conformist.

  Your mother and I made trips to the West. Remember? I don’t think you enjoyed them much. You wanted to be like the other kids. Am I right, Karl? Or were you secretly taking everything in and becoming desperate to be a normal citizen in the West? There are times I wish we could talk about all this while I’m still alive.

  It was in March ’84 that your grandmother took a turn for the worse.

  ‘I feel wretched, Vlady. I am ready to die.’

  Gertrude was lying in bed. Outside the first buds of spring had appeared on the linden trees. The doctor had been and injected her with painkillers. Helge and you were in Dresden for the weekend. I sat on a stool and looked at the shrivelled little woman. She had been confined to her bed for nearly a year and the old Gertrude was barely recognizable.

  ‘I know, Mutti.’

  Ever since we had made peace nearly thirty years ago, the truce had held. Did you realize that she was an active supporter of the KDD and much loved by all the new members? We had a network of nearly four hundred supporters dotted throughout the country. Most of them were Young Communist defectors from the Party. Some of them were children of leading Party officials.

  Gertrude made it her business to know them all. She had written their most popular public manifesto, which had won them notoriety within the ranks of the Stasi and a great deal of respect in the other Germany from the Greens and groups to the left of the SPD, which, of course, cultivated good relations with Honecker and the bureaucracy.

  When we congratulated her for the fine polemical tone of her writing, her face assumed a heroic and magnanimous expression. To tell you the truth, Karl, there were occasions when I felt the KDD would have collapsed through sheer inertia and fatigue. She always came to the rescue, with her uplifting speeches
, her ability to find and approach print shops prepared to publish contraband in return for West German currency, her refusal to accept defeat.

  ‘I won’t be here much longer, Vlady. Think of me kindly, my son. Don’t forget me.’

  ‘How can you even think such a thing?’

  ‘Everything I did was for the cause, Vlady. This is something which you must never forget.’

  A sudden clap of thunder, followed by a squall of rain beating against the window-panes, gave divine emphasis to Gertrude’s message. The morning sunlight had been replaced by a dull grey light, which had slid into the bedroom. Suddenly her eyes became alert and I saw her staring at me.

  ‘Spring showers, Mutti. They always remind me of Moscow.’

  ‘Yes,’ she mumbled. ‘Moscow. You know something, Vlady. Moscow always reminds me of young Ludwik. He used to listen, console, support, give advice, find out what had happened at a secret session of the Politburo, and then we used to laugh. I can still see his eyes twinkling. Outside the snow is falling, but inside…’

  She shut her eyes and I tiptoed to the other end of the room. She opened them immediately afterwards and began to talk to me before she realized I had disappeared. It took her back to my childhood, and wartime Moscow, when everyone knew that the most important thing in the world was the defeat of fascism. Nothing else had mattered. Her mind would not stay fixed on any one episode, but began to wander. Ludwik’s smiling blue eyes. Gertrude began to weep at the memory.

  ‘Forgive me, Ludwik. Forgive me.’

  ‘Mutti? I thought you had gone to sleep. Who should forgive you?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I should not have stayed alive.’

  ‘Mutti? Will you tell me something?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Was Ludwik really my father?’

  I could see that I had stung her. The old face came to life for the last time.

  ‘Yes. Why ask me now?’

  ‘When I looked in the mirror this morning I saw you, but not Ludwik.’

  ‘Stupid boy. For all we know, you may be the exact image of Ludwik’s father. You have my father’s eyebrows. On the day you were born I looked into your face and saw Ludwik looking back at me.’

  I believed her. There was something in the way she spoke that convinced me she was telling the truth. I held her tiny, withered hand and kissed it, but this time she really was asleep. When I put her hand back gently on the bed I felt life ebbing out of her. I rushed to phone the doctor, but it was too late. She died exactly two weeks before her eighty-fourth birthday.

  I stared at the bare room, devoid of colour except for the dark blue curtains which draped the window-frames, curtains she loved because they reminded her of her bedroom in her parents’ house in Munich. They were exactly the same age as the DDR and they had faded a great deal, but she would not be parted from them.

  It seemed hours since the doctor had left. I was sitting in her room looking at her dead body. Images of my childhood and the good times we had enjoyed together flashed past me. I felt guilty. Perhaps it had been cruel to question her about my father, to lacerate her wounds. I was desperate for the truth. I began to doubt her again. Gertrude was not a believer in death-bed confessions. She might not have told me the truth.

  I stared at the photographs on the wall. There was a large one of me in Gertrude’s arms. The one that used to make you laugh, Karl, when you were a boy. I was three months old, just before she came to Moscow. I loved the old family portrait, from her childhood days in Munich. The grandparents and uncle I had never seen. One of me aged twelve, looking sharp-faced and cheeky, wearing a necktie and a smart jacket.

  Later that afternoon the undertakers arrived and took Gertrude away. Alone in the flat, I wept for the first time. I couldn’t fall asleep that night. I got out of bed and began to pace up and down the whole apartment. Helge and you were on the way back from Dresden, but wouldn’t arrive till the morning. I went back to Gertrude’s room.

  An hour later I was still slumped at Gertrude’s cramped and fragile writing desk. I tried opening the secret drawer of the desk, but it was still locked. It was always locked. Forbidden territory. I forced it open and my heartbeat quickened. What treasures would I find?

  I was greeted by one old photograph and letters whose envelopes had browned with age. The photograph was unfamiliar. Gertrude and Ludwik arm-in-arm outside some old café. The late twenties? Berlin or Vienna? Impossible to tell. Slowly I began to look through the letters. A few from Gertrude’s mother, one from Lisa dated Moscow 1925, but nothing of interest. Then I saw a letter addressed to me. It was her handwriting. She had written it six years ago.

  My dearest boy,

  You will find this after I am dead. Everything that belongs to me is in this apartment. It is now yours. The only object I value is a little brooch which used to belong first to my grandmother and later my mother. If you have a daughter I would like you to give it to her. Otherwise it should be kept for Karl’s children. I would not like it to go outside my family.

  Sometimes I think my life was a total failure. Everything went hopelessly wrong. I used to believe that life after the war would be different. It was to a certain extent, but not enough. When I think now of the years after the Revolution, the years when I was a fugitive in other lands, the years that were a painful testing-time for all socialists, when oppression and hunger was dominant … those were the richest and most fruitful years of my life. Do you understand, Vlady? I’m talking now of when I was in my twenties. No matter how awful our conditions were, our spirits were resilient, our vision was impassioned. Now our world is grey, and yet I prefer this grey drabness to what lies on the other side of the dreadful Wall. I can never reconcile myself to the laws of the capitalist jungle and the survival of the richest. Perhaps the greyness will go one day and you and your friends in the KDD will build a better world. I say perhaps, because I don’t know. I’m not sure any more. The blind faith in the future has gone, leaving in its place a vacuum, a big hole, which could be filled by anything.

  The socialist cause has done so much harm to itself and to others that the wound has become our most pertinent symbol. Do you remember those words? You spoke them at one of the KDD meetings and I disagreed with you in public, but secretly I was proud of you. Your father would have been so pleased. I suspect you’re right, but I hope you’re wrong. Anyway I know you’ll do what is best for the movement.

  I’ve already told you how close I feel to Helge and young Karl. You were right about her and I hope she has forgiven me all my early trespasses. She is a wonderful person and I hope that all of you remain happy regardless of what happens in the grey world outside.

  Karl is a very intelligent boy, but I think he is intimidated by your presence. He is not interested in your politics and for this, I feel, you tend to punish him. I never interfered when I was alive, except for one occasion. I told Helge that she should speak to you and tell you not to crush Karl too much. She just smiled. I suppose she saw me as an interfering old fool. She never really got to like me, did she Vlady? But I don’t blame her. I remember once, when I had come into the apartment quietly and neither of you were aware of the fact, I heard you defending me and Helge said: ‘Gertrude will die with the Wall in her head.’ And you laughed, Vlady. You laughed softly. Now that I have gone you can laugh loudly without fear that I might hear you.

  I don’t want this letter, my last communication with you, to become full of bitterness and recriminations. I have always loved you very much and everything I did, I repeat everything, was to protect you and make sure you lived a decent and healthy life. If I hadn’t been pregnant with you I might have behaved differently and I might have died with Ludwik or soon after they got him, but I had to live because you were in my stomach. What do you think, Vlady? Would you rather not have been born?

  I know you and Helge always saw me as a Party hack, but I was not uncritical. I was never a hundred-per-center. What you demanded
was the total rejection of the spirit, logic and practice of the Party. That I opposed very strongly, and now I will tell you why. Ever since the formation of the DDR and the re-foundation of the Party, there were two layers battling for its soul. The ‘cosmopolitans’, as we were called, by which they meant Jews, Germans from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, returning German exiles, cadres who had fought in the Spanish Civil War or served in the Red Army. The second group saw themselves essentially as German national Communists.

  Even inside the Party their nationalism sometimes frightened me. Deep down they preferred Frani Joseph Strauss to Brezhnev. I can see you laughing when you read this and mocking me: ‘Mutti, what a choice. Cow dung versus horse dung.’ That’s what you would say, isn’t it my Vladimiro? But now that you are beginning to take the Lutheran pastors seriously, let me remind you of what Albrecht Schonherr told his flock as Bishop of our Berlin: ‘We do not wish to be a Church alongside Socialism, nor a Church against Socialism: we wish to be a Church within Socialism.’ Within, Vlady! Within. Understand?

  The seeds of nationalism are sprouting everywhere, while the dragon seeds of fascism lie dormant. When the beast rises again we will need a balancing force as disciplined and ruthless to crush it. It can only come from within…

  I have written too much already. Long life to you and yours, my son.

  Gertrude

  As I read her letter, Karl, I was convinced that I was listening to a cracked bell. The secret wasn’t there, and I knew she had one. I knew now for sure because she tried to justify herself through my embryonic presence in her womb. For her to write that could only mean that she was aware of the magnitude of the crimes she had committed. She knew what she was doing. Why had I not pursued her for it while she lived? You may think I was afraid of what I’d learn, and I can’t prove you’re wrong, but perhaps there was a skill Gertrude had learned in the dangerous places she lived in, a chameleon talent to pass unseen, or at least to hide what she was determined not to show. I think it worked on Ludwik too, even though he knew her better than most.