Seven Lies

CHAPTER 9

‘Inge Leibus was asking who you were after you left the other night,’ Margarete said to me a few days later in the Mikado Café off Kollwitzplatz. Before I had left Menzer’s place Margarete had made a point of telling me I would be welcome at other such impromptu gatherings, giving me the addresses of various locations where they were likely to take place.

‘Really? What did you tell her?’

‘I told her you were a poet. A great admirer of hers – her acting, I mean.’

She smirked at me, sheathing her sharp little chin in its cushion of neck flesh. I assumed that her telling me all this was purely tactical: showing herself to be my ally in my pursuit of Inge, so that she could be my consoler when that pursuit failed. Women of her kind of borderline ugliness (to be blunt about it) had gone after me even at Humboldt, evidently considering me to be within their range.

A day or two later she brought me to an apartment not far from Menzer’s where something between a party and a colloquium was taking place, with people packed into a spartan, smoke-filled room, talking heatedly about the imminent destruction of the planet.

Inge was there; again dressed simply, but costumed in her own pale beauty that set her in another plane of being – so it seemed to me – from the lesser mortals congregated in the room.

Margarete insisted on taking me over to meet her properly. She was listening to an agitated old man with thick-lensed glasses and purple, spittle-flecked lips. He was lecturing her on some peace-related matter, and words like ‘Friedenssicherung’ and ‘Friedenswerkstätten’ came sizzling out of his mouth in an angry effluvium of white foam.

Inge noticed me as Margarete and I drew near, and from a brief stilling of her blond-lashed eyes on mine (as pleasurable as being settled on by some beautiful blue and white butterfly), she seemed pleased to see me. But the old man kept haranguing her, and she either couldn’t or wouldn’t initiate the process of polite disengagement that convention allows at such moments.

I watched her listening to him: nodding respectfully, almost meekly, as he laboured through his points (an old-time utopian socialist, it appeared, he was cranking out some line about the inherent pacifism of orthodox Marxism); too sweet-natured to manoeuvre herself out of range of his saliva, or rather (as I came to understand) too conscientiously preoccupied with matching his urgent communicativeness with an answering attentiveness of her own, to notice.

This attentiveness was one of the qualities I came to love most deeply about Inge; this helpless, profligate giving of herself to whatever creature, human or otherwise, came before her with its needs and demands. In practical terms it could be exasperating – the world’s most crashing bores and self-pitying narcissists, who have an unerring instinct for this kind of natural listener, tended to converge on her wherever she went, and I often had to resort to quite brutal means of dragging her away. But when I picture her now I always see her in this attentive state: her slender body tilting, slightly attenuated, towards the other person, her head at a quizzical angle in its straight-hanging arch of silken hair, her lips which seemed to have a little extra upturning red length at the corners (as if for the expression of joys beyond the capacity of normal humans to experience) open in a gentle smile, her serious eyes proffered like pools of grey-blue, restorative waters.

The old man certainly wasn’t about to give her up without a fight. When Margarete finally put her hand on Inge’s arm to interrupt her, he just went on talking, only louder and faster, as if his life depended on it, glaring at me furiously. I started to back away, but Inge, aware now of the possibility of wounding someone else’s feelings in addition to his, made a confused attempt to acknowledge Margarete and myself, while still listening to him. I dwell on these minutiae in order to give a sense of what I perceived about Inge at that moment: that she was possessed of an extreme, perhaps even overdeveloped human feeling, and that she was someone for whom the world was evidently too much at times: someone perhaps in need of protection.

When the old man finally shut up (standing his ground, though, with his lips ominously pursed as though waiting for the first opportunity to unleash another torrent), and Margarete introduced us, I said the first thing that came into my head, which was that I didn’t want to take any of her time, but I just had to tell her how wonderful I thought her performance had been in Macbrecht. Instead of laughing off the compliment, as I expected her to do, she coloured deeply and gave me an awkward smile.

‘Did you really think so?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely!’ I assured her.

She seemed uncomfortable with the flattery, and yet when the old man seized her back and I moved politely away, I did so with the distinct feeling that she had been half hoping for me to continue in the same vein.