Seven Lies

CHAPTER 10

Early evening. Fifteen or twenty people grouped around the chipped marble tables of the Mikado Café. I wandered in, taking a seat at the edge and nodding at my new acquaintances. Inge was there. She smiled at me, but distractedly, and before I even consciously registered who the person sitting next to her must be, I felt my spirits sinking.

He was a large man, tall and very broad, with a reddish complexion that gave his lightly pigmented eyes a hot quality. I sensed immediately that he was not one of my kindred spirits from the privilegentsia: a decade or two of physical labour was clearly visible in the knotted ligatures of his enormous hands, which sat restlessly before him on the round tabletop, crouched and alert-looking.

I didn’t hear him speak much on that occasion, but he was unmistakably the centre of attention. The impact of a recent graffiti campaign in Weimar was being discussed, and most of the remarks were addressed directly to this man. He acknowledged each with a smile – brief, but managing to convey considerable warmth in its short moment.

He was from Jena, that much I knew. What Prenzlauer Berg was to Berlin, Jena was to our republic as a whole. Napoleon had smashed the Prussian army there. Marx received his doctorate from the university. The Workers’ Uprising that nearly toppled Ulbricht and his cronies in ’53 was sparked off in its streets. And now, thirty years later, it was a hotbed of what our security services labelled ‘hostile-negative activity’. Doubtless I was projecting a certain envious admiration, but all this seemed contained in this man’s fiery aura.

Inge looked tense beside him, I remember thinking; a bit diminished in his presence. She was hanging on his words, his silences rather, with her characteristic watchful attentiveness, though in a manner more suggestive of anxiety than the simple generous empathy it usually conveyed. The two of them left the café soon after I got there, followed by a man I took to be their tail (these things were conducted with blatant openness), and the gathering quickly lost its coherence.

‘Thilo Hartman,’ came the voice of Margarete, who had sidled up behind the gilt-bronze chair I’d perched myself on. ‘Inge’s fiancé. Turned up last night. They’re in a big fight already.’

I nodded, having by now guessed who the man was. I didn’t ask what the fight was about – I was feeling suddenly reluctant to acknowledge any interest in Inge, even to myself. Margarete told me the story anyway. Thilo had arrived in Berlin last night, but instead of going to see Inge in Macbrecht (the actors had been released, and the play was on again, without the badges), he had spent the evening with another friend, a woman.

‘They have an open relationship,’ Margarete informed me with a knowing look, ‘both ways, though only Thilo takes advantage of it these days. He’s always pushing her to go out with other men, but she won’t – not any more. She claims not to care about the girlfriends. What makes her mad is he refuses to take her acting seriously. Won’t even bother seeing her plays.’

‘It doesn’t sound as though they’re too well suited to each other,’ I said, affecting a yawn of indifference.

‘He was just in prison,’ she continued, ignoring my comment. ‘Supposed to’ve been serving a three-year sentence, but they let him out…’

I listened to the story, unsure whether Margarete was trying to taunt me with the feebleness of my achievements next to those of my rival, or spur me into action, but either way I found myself feeling increasingly deflated as she spoke. He and some others had staged a silent protest in the main square in Jena, sitting in a circle and unfurling a banner with the word Peace on it. A so-called ‘Working Class Combat Group’ had beaten them up and dragged them off to jail, where they would have been languishing still, had there not been an international outcry on their behalf, prompting the authorities to free them. Most of the protesters had been expatriated – sold to the West for hard currency under the Freikauf system that Inge and I were eventually to take advantage of. But not Thilo:

‘He wouldn’t go. He refused!’

Unlike so many of his radical brethren, Thilo had apparently no desire to convert his oppositional temperament into a ticket out. His business, as he saw it, was here among the browbeaten souls of our republic – working men and women whose parched existences he was intimately familiar with from the large variety of jobs he’d held since leaving school at sixteen. Margarete listed these for me – glassblowing in the former Zeiss factories in Jena, shipping beets and barley in thousand-ton barges down the Saale River, hacking out lignite from the strip mines of northern Thuringia – her tone, whatever her intent, reaching me as distinctly taunting.

‘They could have expelled him but they didn’t want another Biermann on their hands,’ she concluded with a sadistic little smile. Wolf Biermann, poet and folk idol, whose forced expatriation a decade or so earlier had given the opposition an unforeseen rallying point. Hearing Thilo’s name coupled with his was galling to me, to say the least.

‘And meanwhile he can’t be bothered to see his fiancée’s plays,’ I said, intending to strike a note of lofty, detached scepticism about the man’s character.

‘Ah, but they’re in love,’ Margarete replied.

As I looked for the usual glint of mischief in her eyes, I saw to my dismay that for once she was speaking in earnest.

And she was right: they were deeply in love, these two; and despite their difficulties, they were well suited too. In an exhibit of Aztec art that Inge and I saw a few years later in New York was a life-sized sculpture of a naked young man and woman sitting cross-legged next to each other, gazing fiercely out into the distance, each with a hand casually on the other’s knee. The moment I set eyes on it I thought of Inge and her former fiancé. With their burning, outward-directed gazes, their affection – so casually signalled but nevertheless the attitude they were carrying forward into eternity – their vulnerable aura from having been immortalised in a condition of such fierce and youthful vitality, they called to mind the relationship I had insinuated myself into, bringing it back so powerfully and painfully that I almost blurted out loud: That’s you and Thilo…

The ‘open’ nature of their relationship both was and was not as Margarete described it. It may have been true that in practice it applied more to Thilo than Inge, but it wasn’t the opportunistically one-sided proposition I’d understood it to be from Margarete’s description.

Inge revealed to me that the arrangement had been her idea in the first place – an attempt (characteristically well intended and extreme) to accommodate the full, complicated reality of their needs and desires as adult human beings; a deliberate refusal to flinch from any truth about themselves simply because that might cause pain. And I learned from Thilo that his attempts to get Inge to ‘spend time’, as he put it, with other men was sincere to the point that he himself sought out men he thought she would get along with, and sent them in her direction, and furthermore that when she did decide to spend time with one or another of them, he, Thilo, would be racked by such torments of jealousy that on one occasion he had actually bitten a mouthful of flesh out of his own forearm to drown out the pain. He’d shrugged at my bewildered look (I was out of my depth in these waters): ‘You love someone,’ he said, ‘so you want them to be free. And you want to be free yourself. Here, see…’ He pulled up his shirtsleeve. The scar, a jagged-edged crater in the reddish-haired swale of muscle below his elbow, remains in my mind’s eye as the counterpart to Brandt’s livid disfigurement: it was the badge of a mad, fanatic, passionate innocence.