Seven Lies

CHAPTER 14

Snip-snip, snip-snip… My anchoress upstairs at her devotions.

Oh, these scrapbooks of hers!

Snip-snip, snip-snip… Some element of survivor’s guilt in her fixation on these dismal stories: punishing herself for getting out…?

Snip-snip, snip-snip…

Not that it isn’t also squarely the act of repudiation it appears to be.

More so than ever, in fact: a distinct sharpening of focus seems to have occurred since the current administration took office. The latest volume was lying open on her desk the other day when I went up to check our insurance policy. The old ‘human interest’ stories had given way to more explicitly political pieces. There was a report on the rolling back of the Clean Water Act; another on the destruction of coral reefs, with a Bloomingdale’s ad for a new line in coral jewellery set pointedly beside it. On the opposite page were articles on the attacks of two years ago: an administration official saying, ‘We should flatten a country or two’; a piece recommending torture be legalised for terrorist interrogations; a professor fired for suggesting America ‘had it coming’; vigilantes in some suburb attacking homeowners who didn’t have flags in their yards…

I leafed back, saw a piece comparing the new powers of surveillance permitted under the Patriot Act with those exercised by the totalitarian regimes of the former Eastern Bloc countries. I flinched at this; balked, found myself unable to read on. Hard for me – impossible, really – with all I have staked on my faith in the greatness of this nation, to swallow such a comparison. I need to believe that what de Tocqueville declared of America remains true in spite of everything: ‘America is great because she is good.’

Snip-snip, snip-snip… As if she were methodically cutting away the very ground under my feet!

Apropos of which, a few years ago we were told our refugee status might be questioned if we ever travelled abroad, and we were advised to apply for citizenship. After several months of filling out forms, being fingerprinted, interviewed, having our English tested, we were given a date to go to the US Southern District Courthouse in Lower Manhattan and be sworn in as American citizens.

Inge was noticeably tense on the bus ride down. She had seemed, when we embarked on this process, to accept my presentation of it as a purely practical matter, without deeper implications. Naturally, I was relieved at her lack of resistance: my priority, as ever, was to keep her with me, on whatever terms and at whatever cost, and the more unified the outward circumstances of our lives, it seemed, the less power our internal fault lines had to push us apart. But now all of a sudden, in the face of this imminent rite of passage into a new nationality, her breezy indifference appeared to be faltering. I wasn’t altogether surprised, but given that we had come this far, I didn’t expect anything dramatic to develop. Still, I kept a watchful eye on her.

At the courthouse, we went up to the ninth floor, joining the crowd of other initiates outside the oath room. The atmosphere was oddly subdued: none of the festive excitement I had read about in reports of these occasions. People were muttering to their lawyers, talking on cell phones, thumbing their Palm-Pilots: all business. I could feel Inge taking this in, and sensed that it was stoking her misgivings. She stood beside me, more agitated by the minute. I resisted the impulse to try to calm her down, afraid this would make matters worse. The important thing, I told myself, was to get through the ceremony. We could talk about what it meant afterwards.

A US marshal appeared and shepherded us into rows of benches in the wood-panelled oath room. Then a judge entered and gave a speech about the Constitution. It was an enlightened speech, emphasising the importance of tolerating voices of dissent in a democracy, and it seemed to me that Inge ought to be reassured by it. But as we listened I could sense her discomfort growing. Her eyes were darting around the room. I followed her glance, wondering uneasily what she was seeing in the expressionless faces of our fellow initiates. After the judge had finished, he told us all to rise.

‘We will now say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.’

It was at that moment that Inge fled.

‘I’ll wait for you downstairs,’ she whispered, stumbling past the other people in our pew. Before I could say anything, she simply ran off down the aisle, brushing by the astonished marshal without a word of explanation.

‘There’s no re-entry, ma’am…’ he called after her.

I stood there, stunned, sensing at once the momentousness of what she had done; feeling its impact, like an axe blow, on what remained of the connection between us, realising that if I wanted to salvage anything I should go after her, and yet already experiencing that curious retroactive fatalism of mine: the sensation, once again, that this was after all nothing new; that it had already happened.

The ceremony ground on without her. I pledged my allegiance along with the rest of the initiates, and swore to bear arms for my new country. I added my voice to a tuneless, droning chorus of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. I signed my naturalisation certificate, shook the judge’s hand, and picked up my crookedly photocopied letter from the president telling me that ‘Americans are generous and strong and decent not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves’.

Inge was waiting for me downstairs. She didn’t offer an explanation and I didn’t ask for one. What was there to say? We had become, literally, foreign to each other.

BUT WHAT I was intending to write before the sound of Inge’s scissors distracted me has nothing to do with any of this.

Menzer called yesterday. Klaus Menzer.

Inge was at work. I was in, but didn’t pick up. He left a message asking me to call him back. He was here, right here in America. The number he gave had a New York area code, a fact I absorbed with a lurch of dismay. I erased the message without taking it; a futile gesture, I realised even at the time.

My head was reeling. I went out – up to the quarry, Lena trotting ahead of me. Fall in full spate up there. Raspberry-coloured sumacs. Fiery orange creepers running up the radio tower. I sat on the stone seat under the cliff, wondering what he could be doing in this country, and what reason he could have for wanting to get in touch with me – with me – after all these years. Impossible to imagine he could be calling out of some impulse of innocent nostalgic sociability; not that coiled and involuted man.

Are you Stefan Vogel? Yes. Splash.

And now Menzer. A second missile coming at me out of the past!

He called again this morning. This time I picked up: didn’t want to risk him calling again while Inge was in. He was blandly friendly, chatting casually as if there had been no decade-and-a-half gap since we last spoke, and certainly no convulsions on the world stage worth mentioning. He asked if I had plans to come down to the city any time soon so that we could ‘get together’. I made a non-committal answer and attempted to change the subject.

‘Are you still writing poetry?’ I asked him.

‘I really hope you can come down, Stefan,’ he replied. ‘It would be almost a blast…’

I caught at once the old, languid coerciveness in his voice, and sensing I might have more to lose by resisting him than by giving in, I agreed to meet him next week.