Seven Lies

CHAPTER 11

‘… Yes, but if one has devoured the language, then one has eaten the order it represents as well…’

Menzer again. Holding court amid the book piles and junk furniture of his spacious squat.

The occasion was a new issue of one of his literary magazines. He and his friends published several of these magazines, filling them with esoteric poems and articles.

‘Where’ve you been? Inge’s been asking for you,’ Margarete had told me when I drifted back to Prenzl’berg (as I had now learned to call it) after a few days’ absence. ‘Come to Menzer’s tomorrow. She’ll be there – alone. Fiancé’s back in Jena.’

And there she was, frailly luminous in the afternoon light, sitting by the far window. She smiled at me. The smile, like all her expressions, had a cleanness about it: the transparent registering of a simple motion of the heart, unclouded by the equivocations that afflict most of the looks one receives in adult company.

‘Hello, Robert,’ she said.

‘Stefan,’ I corrected her.

‘Stefan! Of course! How stupid of me! I’m so sorry!’ She looked so upset by her mistake that the sting it caused me gave way at once to a chivalric urge to protect her from her own mortification.

‘Don’t worry about it – please!’

She gestured at the seat beside her – a stool made of stacked tyre hubs – and I sat down. We looked at each other in silence for a moment, while Menzer’s drawl rose over the din of other voices across the room, buoyed on its little cushion of self-delight.

‘… a poetics of silence speaking between the signs… Absolute bankruptcy of the language of power…’

‘How’s the play going?’ I asked Inge, my own voice sounding a little thin in my ear.

‘It’s finished. We’re rehearsing a new one.’

‘Oh, yes? What is it?’

She told me about the new play. She seemed to enjoy talking about it, and as I wanted her to associate me with pleasurable sensations, I questioned her at some length. In our last conversation I had formed the suspicion that she mightn’t be altogether immune to flattery, and I found myself looking for opportunities to make subtly complimentary remarks about her acting. She responded to these with evident pleasure – not in a way that suggested any conceit about her work; quite the opposite: even though she had performed in several major productions, she turned out to be insecure about her abilities. She told me that she had never had any formal training.

‘That’s astonishing!’ I heard myself exclaim. ‘How did you learn to control an audience like that?’

‘Oh, I don’t… Well… It’s nice of you to say that…’

‘I mean it.’

She settled her eyes on mine, her expression neutral. I felt her taking my measure, sizing me up on some delicate internal instrument of appraisal; not yet entirely sure, after all, what it meant to be complimented by this newcomer to her circle.

After a while Menzer and his friends read poems from the new magazine. Paul Boeden, Katje’s blond-bearded brother, read first, delivering his lines in what seemed to me an affected monotone. When Menzer himself followed, I saw where Paul had borrowed the tone from, though in Menzer’s case the flatness seemed natural, even compelling; as though one were being read to by a dead man – a grey-skinned, shadow-filled ghost, come from beyond the grave to amuse himself with some private joke at the expense of the living.

Klaus Menzer, that supremely detached man… In the first of two interviews he gave Stern after reunification, I caught at once that amused, bored, circuitously self-aggrandising air of his. My mother had sent me the piece. ‘Total indifference to the Stasi was our attitude.’ I could hear the languid drawl. ‘They’d drag me in for questioning every few months, but I never cared – didn’t even hold it against them…’ He got his artist’s visa, his Kunstlervisum, in ’87, a year after Inge and I had left, and set up in West Berlin as an art critic, his pronouncements on the death of this or that time-honoured medium of human creativity – sculpture, painting, drawing – rapidly establishing him as a player at the high-stakes museum-culture tables of Western Europe. His second interview, a year after the first, was another story altogether, and I must try not to let it colour my portrayal of the Menzer I knew, or thought I knew. The truth was I admired him – so much that I even began borrowing some of his mannerisms myself. It’s almost funny, I would hear myself drawling, or it’s almost boring… And even knowing what I do know about him now, I am hardly in a position to despise him. That, as he might say, would be almost hypocritical.

After the reading was over, I turned back to Inge, intending to continue monopolising her. But before long Paul Boeden came up and stood just behind me.

‘How’s life, Inge?’ he said, cutting right across me.

In her usual flustered way, Inge looked helplessly back and forth between us. With a show of good grace, I moved aside to make room for Paul. He gave me a brisk nod. Though we hadn’t mentioned our shared past, I had the sense that he knew who I was, and this made me wary of him. He also appeared to be on easy terms with Inge, which further added to my discomfort at his intrusion.

I am trying to account here for the ill-judged step I made a few minutes after he joined us.

Inge had just congratulated him on his reading.

‘Stefan’s a poet too,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that right, Stefan?’ she added, putting her hand on my arm. ‘Margarete told me…’

I knew she was saying this just to make conversation, but her gesture – the warm interest it seemed to promise if only what she was saying were in fact the case – made me momentarily giddy.

‘A poet? Really?’ Paul asked, raising an eyebrow. I felt suddenly that he knew exactly who I was – knew all about my father’s disgrace, perhaps even about my own humiliation at the hands of his sister, and that in his mind this gave him the right to look down on me.

Among the few things I took in during my stint in the Philosophy Department at Humboldt was the idea – I forget whose – that the underlying motive for all human action is the desire for recognition – recognition of one’s worth and dignity as a human being, without which one was a nonperson; a slave. The concept had articulated very precisely the obscure cravings of my own soul, and it had lodged itself in my imagination. It had felt incontrovertible. And it was surely what motivated me now as I replied to Inge and Paul’s question with a gesture of assent – half nod, half shrug – feeling instantly the immense weariness of spirit that, in my experience, accompanies the discharging of all such acts of self-destructive folly.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah?’ Paul replied, baring his teeth in a smile that seemed to me fully Brandtian in its mocking incredulity. ‘Where can we read some of your stuff?’

I hesitated. Inge was looking at me with a pleasant, innocent smile, waiting politely for the simple answer to a simple question. I didn’t feel that she herself was all that curious as to where she could read my ‘stuff’, and my answer, when I gave it, wasn’t to impress her so much as to prevent any suggestion arising in her mind that I might be a less than straightforward character. As far as Paul was concerned, I perhaps was guilty of wanting to impress him; to force him to ‘recognise’ me. The situation became further complicated by the fact that Menzer, who had been wandering in our direction, was now within earshot. With a feeling of reckless abandon, I blurted:

‘Sinn und Form.’

‘Sinn und Form? No kidding!’

Sinn und Form had been the leading journal of the literary establishment throughout my childhood, and as far as I knew, still was. My Uncle Heinrich was a subscriber and occasional contributor, and always brought the latest issue with him when he came to visit. I never read it, but its sober appearance, lying on the coffee table, was as permanent a feature in my private landscape as the Kurt Teske nude or the American radio (before Otto smashed it). It was a part of who I was, which is no doubt why its name tripped so readily off my tongue.

‘Have I died of boredom or did I just hear the words Sinn und Form?’ Menzer drawled, joining us.

‘This man’s published his poems there,’ Paul told him.

Menzer looked at me, as if noticing me for the first time. To my surprise he treated me to a smile -a half smile, at least – and held out his hand to me.

‘By the way, I’m Menzer,’ he said. ‘We haven’t met properly.’

‘Stefan Vogel.’

‘I didn’t mean to be rude there. That’s good, getting your stuff in Sinn und Form. Almost impressive. I used to try them myself. They never accepted anything, so naturally I pretend to despise them for being hopelessly middle-of-the-road. Which issues are your poems in? I’d like to read them.’

I’d seen that last bit coming, at least, and by the time he got to it, my sprinter’s imagination, with its knack for the short-term solution, had come up with an answer:

‘They were only just accepted. I think they’ll be out in the next issue.’

‘Good. Well, be sure to bring it along when it comes out.’

‘I will.’

‘I’d like to read them too,’ Inge said, smiling at me.

And there I was: back on the treadmill again, back in my little hell of vainglory, deceit, and desperate expedient. And whereas the price before had merely been a few years of my manhood, it was now apparently to be my soul.