Seven Lies

CHAPTER 16

It’s two o’clock, a clear day with particles of ice glinting in the air all the way across the valley. I’m sitting on the stone bench at the quarry in a grey wool coat and fawn-coloured hat with the flaps down over my ears. Lena is in the house; I didn’t want her with me. On my lap is a new notebook. The ones I have already filled are in an envelope on the kitchen table with Inge’s name on it. At five thirty Inge will come home from her shift at the health food store. If she starts reading right away, she should finish around seven. By that time it will be dark.

The trees are mostly bare now. Everywhere a greyness and a puffiness. Woolly spoor-heads of coltsfoot. Dead goldenrod, the yellow burrs dusty and whitish, stalks black-spotted, mildewy.

Am I afraid? Yes: but in a narrow, purely physical way; the fear concentrated in the back of my neck, from which gossamer-like feelers seem to have stretched all the way up to the clifftop behind me, sending little shock waves back down at every rustle or breath of wind.

I remember when we first came here. Lowenthal’s film had ended in fiasco. Shooting had been delayed twice, and by the time it finally started, Inge’s brief moment of unalloyed happiness in our exile had passed. Already she had embarked on her melancholy rebellion against our new life, and this, alas, included the film.

From the start she was ill at ease on the set: distracted, withdrawn, her performance erratic. She seemed under a strange compulsion to fail, spectacularly and in public; almost as if to turn herself into a living reproach against the whole enterprise. It didn’t help that this period coincided with the time of her ‘mercy missions’ around the city. Aside from making her frequently late, these expeditions left her too shattered to reimmerse herself in her role with any conviction. Having been dressed in her house-cleaning outfit and made up and brought onto the set, she would stand with her mop or vacuum cleaner in front of the rolling camera looking utterly lost, as if she really were some hapless Polish cleaning lady who had wandered accidentally onto a film set, then turn apologetically to Lowenthal, who, patient to a fault, would cut, give her time to collect herself and call for another take, only for the same thing to happen again, and then again… To watch someone sabotage herself is painful under any circumstances; in the concentrated glare and scrutiny of a film set it was unbearable.

I wanted to help, naturally. At Lowenthal’s request I came every day to the location. He stationed me beside him at the black and white video monitor, and between shots he would ask me in private what I thought was going on in Inge’s mind. I was mesmerised by the grainy, dream-like images of my wife on the little screen, though what I saw in them had little to do with her acting. Like Dr Serkin’s X-rays, they seemed to illuminate a state of affairs I had so far managed to conceal from myself. The depth of uncomprehending anguish in them caught me off my guard. It seemed to me my own marriage, and the actions that had brought it about, were being revealed to me with a stark, accusing brilliance. And like those slender trees I used to gaze at in the derelict garden near our apartment in Berlin, they brought back all my old feelings of longing and exclusion: that sense of another universe, bordering intimately on my own, yet impenetrable, and all the more painfully so for the fact that it was now officially in my possession.

None of which would have been any use to Lowenthal, even if I could have summoned the candour to tell him.

The shoot went grimly on, the economics of such enterprises apparently making it impossible to abort them and put everyone concerned out of their misery. By the end the producer was openly predicting the film would go straight to video without a theatrical release. He was right.

And meanwhile I had problems of my own. Those two words that had started popping up everywhere like a pair of fashionable Russian performance artists – ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ – had turned out to be more like harbingers of the apocalypse. The world I had grown up in had started collapsing before my eyes. My gathering, dream-like horror as one state after another fell: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania… That sense of some monumental dam – solid as a mountain range, one had assumed – suddenly spouting leaks here, bursting out in torrents there, crumbling, exploding; the pent-up waters spilling out in a year-long jubilant frenzy of rebellion, cascading week after week over TV screens and magazine covers… The ghastly comedy of being the one person in the Western world unable to rejoice. Being obliged – in my capacity as one of Gloria Danilov’s ‘dissi-dents’ – to feign the triumphal delight of a man whose solemn principles had been vindicated, when all I could think of was that this was nothing but some cruel cosmic joke directed at me, me personally: that the very freedom for which I had paid so dearly was all along destined to have been given to me, gratis… Not to mention the creeping realisation that with every day’s opening up of secret archives and locked files, the ‘pledge’ I had written out and signed – that little devil’s bargain I had made on the presumption that it was to be kept in utter darkness for ever – was steadily being approached by this tide of light, that it was merely a matter of time before my black hour was made incandescently public…

So that I was suddenly eager to go and bury myself somewhere out of sight of prying eyes.

Inge had never cared for the city, and at this point needed no persuading to leave. We bought an old car and drove up here. It was winter; two feet of snow on the ground. We found the house through an ad in the Aurelia Gazette. Our landlord lent us snowshoes and took us up into the woods – my first excursion into the American wilderness.

The sky above the trees was a dark fluorescent blue. Where the sun came through, the melted and refrozen snow crust gleamed like marble. Fallen trees raised its surface in long, smooth veins. A huge icicle fell from the quarry cliff as we passed, hitting the frozen pool with a wondrous tinkling crash. Then the staggering immensity of this view across the valley. Not a road or dwelling or any other construction visible beyond the transmission tower directly below us (and even that in its lace of frost-flowers more like some outcropping of the rocks than anything man-made), so that you had the sense of gazing back into some prehuman world utterly unconnected to this one.

Astounding, humanless purity of it all! The suspicion I had that what I had been hungering for all my life; what, with my limited terms of reference, I had named ‘America’ – that concentration of unbounded delight and freedom – was something perhaps not human at all, was possibly even incompatible with the condition of being human, and that entering into it might in fact require precisely this: the annihilation of oneself.

Self-destruction: ‘the beginning of all philosophy’. Some other Denker I had to read at Humboldt. My obscure sense, whenever contemplating this particular act, that far from being a gesture of despair, it is actually one of extreme optimism. I think of Dr Serkin’s reversed tarot cards. My life force – my élan vital, as he called it – passing, for tactical reasons, as its opposite… Not a desire to be dead, but to be differently alive: to be rid of a parasitical second self that has so encumbered one’s spirit only the most radical surgery can remove it. One knows, rationally, that such surgery must result in the death of the patient, but that isn’t the point of it at all, and the bulk of one’s mind persists in regarding the extinction as a side effect; regrettable, of course, but not to be confused with the real goal: the smashing through into a new, clear, unburdened state of being. The dead man’s grab at life!

TWO THIRTY-FIVE. Clouds filling up with yellow light, their underbellies grey. A smell of fermenting apples on the breeze. No reason to hold anything back at this point, and yet I still feel myself resisting. My old habits of silence and secrecy. Smash them!

‘… Stefan, dear boy. Good of you to come…’

Uncle Heinrich, rising with a warm smile from his desk at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police. January 1986.

The room comes back to me in vivid detail – the oak cabinets, the rows of law books, the tin globe, the old-fashioned typewriter that looked like the offspring of a church organ and a halved artichoke – preserving itself in memory as if it knew I should be compelled to revisit it constantly over the years, as I have.

‘Look at what I have here!’ my uncle says joyously. ‘It arrived this morning. It’s an advance copy. I knew you’d be terribly eager to see it.’

He hands me the new issue of Sinn und Form.

‘Isn’t that thrilling?’

Inside the magazine are two new ‘poems’ of mine. Aside from not wanting to lose face after my stupid boast, I had sensed that having work published in a prestigious magazine might help me in my pursuit of Inge. Not that I thought she herself would be impressed by such a coup, or even very interested in it (I was right; she couldn’t have cared less), but I felt that it would give me a certain confidence I was lacking; a basis from which to promote myself. It would be a one-off relapse into my old habits, I had vowed, and from the vague nausea filling me there in my uncle’s office as I opened the magazine and went through the motions of gazing with grateful pride at my illegitimate offspring on their crisp white sheets, I knew that I was not even going to be tempted to repeat the experiment. With luck it would give me the credibility I needed in the eyes of my new acquaintances in Prenzlauer Berg, but beyond that, the sooner the whole matter disappeared back into the past, the better.

After making polite conversation with my uncle for a few more minutes, I stood up to leave.

‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to meet a fellow I know, a colleague of sorts. He thinks you could be of some service to him. I told him I was sure you’d be more than willing to help. May I introduce you to him when you have a moment?’

No hint of shame or awkwardness as he asked. Even in hindsight, I find it hard to say for sure that he was aware of any leverage he might have acquired over me from the favour he had just done, let alone that he was deliberately exploiting it. If there was any notion of reciprocity operating in his mind, it was simply what was fully permitted by social convention: a harmless favour done, a harmless (in his eyes) favour asked in return. If I had refused him outright he might have been a little taken aback, but perhaps that would have been the end of the matter. Anyway, I myself was still too ignorant of these affairs to grasp fully what he was asking me, and other than the usual instinctive reluctance I felt whenever anybody asked anything of me, I had no particular reason for refusing him.

So, from that little leather-upholstered antechamber to hell I found myself proceeding, a few days later, to the living room of an apartment in the quiet suburb of Hohenschonhausen. It belonged to a Lieutenant Hager, case officer in the Operational Group of Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring and penetrating cultural life and political Aussteiger activity in the GDR. A sandy-haired man of forty: red eyelashes, thin-bridged nose, austere mouth; pale, freckled complexion indicative of a certain constitutional delicacy, against which the hair-fine lines under his eyes and at the corners of his lips suggested an opposing effort of disciplined self-fortification. He was married, with a child, a boy of six, who was occasionally present when we met. Our first meeting was to establish that I would be willing, in principle, to work as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, an ‘unofficial collaborator’, and for him to outline the plan of action he had devised for me if I should accept. He made no overt effort to coerce me into accepting, and in fact went out of his way to stress the purely voluntary nature of this service:

‘Any time you want to stop working for us, Stefan, all you have to do is say that you categorically refuse. That’s the official rule. Not all case officers lay it out as clearly as they might. For me it’s an essential part of our agreement. Do you understand?’

I nodded. He seemed to be telling me the truth, and yet I had so little sense of there being any choice in the matter that I experienced my acquiescence in it not as something that might or might not happen but as something that had, once again, already happened. Still unclear to me whether this feeling was the result simply of an accurate reading of the forces implicit in the situation, or whether it came from some aberrant warp in my own psyche: a willingness to please, manifesting itself inside me as a feeling of irresistible pressure.

Or was there something even more dubious at work in my mind: was I, could I possibly have been, actively interested in the pursuit and destruction of the individual whom Lieutenant Hager wanted me to help him ensnare? Is it possible I was motivated not just by some dim terror of having my fraudulent poetic credentials exposed, but also by an active desire to eliminate a rival?

I am attempting to understand myself here: not to make excuses, but not to fall into the inverse vanity of exaggerating my own misdeeds either. ‘It is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind that exists in oneself’: Frantz Fanon’s words, drummed into us at school. I summon an image of my old self to hold up for examination. I can discern fearfulness in that unformed, boyish face; I can see a lurking, secretive ambition; I can make out all sorts of furtive, inordinate desires, but in truth I can find no sign of actual malice.

On the other hand, I can hardly be an objective judge in this matter, and it seems a little late in the day to be erring on the side of anything other than harshness… So, let the accused stand charged with cold-blooded complicity to destroy another human being for his personal gain!

THREE O’CLOCK. Will I hear Menzer’s car? I hope not. My state of mind is somewhat precarious. I think I will be able to stay put only so long as it’s just a matter of simple obedience to the principle of inertia. Any stimulus requiring an act of will to resist is likely to prove too much.

Of course, it’s possible he won’t show up. He needed some persuading when I went down to see him again in the city. Not that he had any scruples about the act itself – or if he had, he wasn’t going to risk being out-Menzered by admitting to them in the face of my own apparent indifference. But he was concerned about the risks, and even after I had demonstrated how negligible these were – a shot that would cause no alarm, no possible connection between himself and the victim and no imaginable incentive on my part to incriminate either him or, by extension, myself – he remained sceptical.

On the other hand, he clearly needed money. He had insisted I bring my payment in cash, and the sight of this as he glanced into the large envelope I handed him over our café table had an effect on him like a surging current on an appliance: something in him seemed to dilate. Though again, as if to offset any suggestion of being impressed, he immediately put on a hard, businesslike expression.

‘Well. Suppose I were to ask you to give me the other ten in advance?’

I had come prepared for something like this, and without hesitation took a second envelope from my bag.

‘I’ll give you another five,’ I told him – the total, as it happened, of what I had been able to cash out of my trading account. ‘The rest afterwards.’

He looked thoughtfully at the envelope.

‘OK, maybe. But I’m interested in how I’m supposed to know you’ll actually give it to me afterwards.’

‘I think a better question is how will I know you won’t keep coming back for more after I do? Who has the most leverage in this situation, after all? Considering the past you and I share.’

He laughed at that, conceding the point.

‘What about Inge, though – isn’t she going to wonder about your bank balance?’

‘I deal with all our finances. She’s not interested.’

‘All right. OK. Possibly maybe. Listen, though. Not that it’s in my interest to say this, but do you really think this is going to solve your problems? With her?’

‘I’ll worry about that,’ I said.

He stared hard at me for some time. Then, abruptly, he shrugged.

‘Well, why not? Anything to help out an old pal!’

I gave him the envelope.

‘It’s almost funny,’ he said as we parted company a little later, ‘I was always the one who walked off with the marks-manship prize in our Hans Beimler games. Maybe I’m about to discover my true vocation!’

‘SO. DID YOU decide on a code name?’

My second meeting with Lieutenant Hager.

‘How about Sloth?’

‘Your school nickname?’

There is very little the lieutenant doesn’t know about me.

I shrug.

‘Well, it’s your choice. I’ll put it here in the file. You need to write out this pledge, by the way.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That you’re working for us entirely of your own free will.’

‘OK.’

The boy is present, sitting quietly on the floor, building a windmill out of Lege. He and his father belong to an ‘Interest Association’ devoted to restoring old windmills.

‘Here are permits for the journal…’

He wants me to launch a sort of samizdat journal, modestly risk-taking at first, so as not to arouse suspicion of official involvement, then growing steadily more inflammatory.

‘Permit to set text in type. Permit to print. Permit to bind. Permit to distribute up to one hundred copies. Be sure to submit receipts for all expenses. We’ll reimburse you every month, with a premium for good work. By that we don’t mean gossip or rumour but hard facts, along with evidence that can hold up in court. Our ministry lawyers are very particular about that. Don’t rush things: it takes time to get your legend accepted. We want people to see you as a serious editor, willing to take real chances; not just some fly-by-night renegade. We’re going to give you your own tail; it’ll add to your credibility. Wait, Detlef, that doesn’t go there…’

He goes over to help his boy with the windmill, working from a photograph, while continuing to talk to me from the floor:

‘I often tell people in your situation to think of themselves not only as the agent of the Stasi in the peace movement, but also as the agent of the peace movement within the Stasi. The fact is that although we do make it our business to control this so-called opposition, we’re as eager as they are to avoid a direct conflict with the West, and we’ve recognised right from the start that many of their ideas are worth paying attention to. So you see, we can learn from you. It’s just a question of whether one allows that energy to be diverted into wasteful political side issues, or whether one keeps it focused on the immediate pressing danger. Personally I find it a little immoral to be talking about, oh, I don’t know, reunification, shall we say, or so-called freedom of expression, or even individual human rights, while enough Pershings and Cruise missiles to incinerate every one of us a thousand times over are being amassed right here on our borders…’

He tousles his son’s hair, then gets up and returns to his chair, as if reminded by his own calm eloquence of the seriousness of the matter at hand.

‘You’re wondering what I have to say about the Soviet SS 20s,’ he continues with a smile. ‘That’s all right, we can discuss anything here. Well, I’ll tell you: having made quite an extensive study of these things, I can state categorically that the idea of being able to make peace without a credible threat of one’s own is a suicidal illusion. We would simply be swallowed up into the capitalist order, where we would incidentally occupy the very lowest rung. Anyone proposing unilateral peace has to be in effect proposing the end of socialism, which means the end of hope for all but the most powerful and predatory groups of people on the planet, and finally of course the end of the planet itself. Which is why certain potential leaders of the movement have to be considered hostile-negative forces. They may be full of noble intentions but unfortunately that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Do you see?’

I felt that the lieutenant believed what he was saying; that his words were his own and that he had come to them by his own processes of thought. Unlike my uncle, whose ‘innocence’ was no doubt largely a matter of an innate disposition to serve the prevailing system as cheerfully and faithfully as he could, Lieutenant Hager seemed to have thought hard about the cause he worked for. He prided himself on his idealism and his moral integrity (the Lege set was a case in point: only a zealot would have inflicted that dismal knockoff of Western Lego on his child; most men in his position would have obtained a set of the real thing). His lean, smooth-drawn face, with its lines like fine wrinkles accidentally ironed into a shirt, had a distinctly monkish quality, and I have no doubt that in his own imagination he was playing the role of the hero of conscience, so pure of heart he could engage in activities of a nature that might have tainted a less sterling soul than his own.

And maybe he was right: maybe what was so catastrophically damaging to me was entirely harmless to him. Who am I, after all, to look back at that face and say with such confidence: ‘Demon’? What do I have to support this view other than my own sense of injury? History? A dubious ally: suppose its verdict had gone the other way (and after all, it has given the victor’s laurels to plenty of questionable causes over time, while cutting off plenty of noble ones before they had a chance to flower); suppose his system had triumphed, flourished into the egalitarian paradise it was all along intended to become, then how would my judgement of the lieutenant itself be judged? With precisely that incredulous scorn we reserve for all those pitiful figures from the past who failed, out of stupidity or narrow-mindedness to perceive which way the wind was blowing.

Blickfeldmassnahmen: our professional term for the act of ‘keeping someone in view’.

Abschöpfung: our word for ‘pumping’.

I was to keep Thilo Hartman ‘in view’. And, in my capacity as editor of a new and daringly outspoken oppositional magazine, I was to look for opportunities to ‘pump’ him.

THREE FORTY. Bare twigs gleaming like polished wires in the low sun. Lichen on tree trunks showing a gaudy bluish green. A breeze comes down over the clifftop; blows a flurry of yellow leaves off the birches, throwing them out into the lake of air where they spin down, catching the sunlight like gold coins.

Always this feeling of something being conveyed, in some not quite intelligible language, by that other world. Sense of being appraised by the stones, recognised for what I am by the trees. And not just from my Bausoldaten days of cutting them down.

This strange yearning they provoke in me! What the ancients had in mind with their idea of the self-slaughtered living on as trees in the afterlife? A projection of precisely this intense desire to sidestep one’s own consciousness and merge into the backdrop, the landscape?

That time, right after our marriage, when I almost made a clean breast of things to Inge. Sudden sense, as I turned to her, of the power of words to explode in the air like dynamite, and kill. I kissed her instead.

Inge. Thilo marrying that other woman was out of love for you; you must have half known that: free you from the impossible difficulty of being his lover by trying to make you hate him. Though by the time you figured it out you were here, past the point of no return, while he was – where? In jail? On trial? Alive? Dead? We didn’t know: you didn’t want to know. Your guilt about leaving required you to imagine the worst, and to live as if that were so.

That curious mood of good-humoured resignation he was in during the hour he and I spent together in the little office of my ‘magazine’. As though he knew perfectly well there was as much chance that I was in the process of betraying him even as we spoke, as that I was the sympathetic spirit I pretended to be. Choosing, out of what seemed nothing more than sheer gentlemanly magnanimity, to believe the latter, or at least to act as if he did; to respond to my casual probing with such cordial frankness I was left with the sense that even in the part of his mind that must have intuited, in general terms if not precise detail, the wire leading from the pen in my pocket to the transmitter in the heel of my shoe, he bore no ill will, and possibly even forgave me in advance (almost the hardest part for me to bear, that feeling of forgiveness; of being left entirely alone to absorb all reverberation of harm). That moment, after he had shown me the scar on his arm from biting himself in the attempt to master his own feelings of jealousy while you were dutifully following his injunction to ‘spend time’ with other men; right after that, how I abruptly changed the subject – catch him off his guard, as Lieutenant Hager had instructed me – to the question of the Soviet presence on our soil and then the even more taboo subject of reunification; how, as he gave me his truthful, treasonous answers (handing me his own smiling head on a platter), I felt as though I were traversing a rift in nature, from the far side of which all the previous stumbles and tumblings in my lifelong career of falling seemed in comparison to have occurred in a universe of almost childlike innocence!

Yesterday I bought a hunting rifle. I wrapped it in plastic and took it up to the top of the cliff. There’s an enormous fallen tree there, with several smaller trees splintered and crushed beneath it. Under its torn-up roots is a hole the size of a bomb crater. I climbed down into this and laid the rifle under a ledge of bedrock jutting in through the dirt near the bottom. Menzer has clear instructions how to find it. Assuming he comes (and I am inclined to think he will), he’ll park on the old service road for the transmission tower and make his way up the rocky path to the top of the cliff. From there, having found the rifle, he will move towards the edge of the cliff, where, peering down through the birches below him, he will see the mound of bluestone rubble with the stone bench where Inge’s ‘lover’ will be seated, wearing a fawn-coloured hat, looking out at the view as he does every afternoon between four and five o’clock. He will take one shot, which will cause no particular alarm, hunting season having opened today. Then he will go home and wait for me to contact him, which, unless I am seriously mistaken about the nature of what awaits me, will take, as they say here, for ever.

THREE FIFTY. A sheen on the horizon now; a tint of green like a tight-stretched band of silk. What else to set down? I went back a few years ago. Back to Berlin: February of 1999, for my father’s funeral. He had died of a blood clot in the cerebellum, while playing chess at his social club.

Otto picked me up at the airport. He and I had kept in touch, though he wasn’t much of a correspondent. He’d been struggling, I knew that: divorced, in and out of work, though a couple of years earlier he had turned his military training to advantage, setting up a small garage. A round beard, Amish-style, circled his broad face. It made him look young – the unshaven upper lip – though also prehistoric. He was friendly, a little bemused by me as ever, a little diffident.

‘I’ve thought a lot about you going to America,’ he said as we drove. ‘I’ve decided it must have had to do with you being a poet, having the imagination to, you know -’

I turned from him uncomfortably, trying not to listen; watching the rain-blurred parallels of Karl Marx Allee unreel on either side of us, grandiose and relentless. In my head I conducted a shattering conversation with him which would begin with my saying: Remember those aquavit bottles you got in trouble for stealing…?

He must have come to an end, as there was a long silence.

‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘some woman called for you. She wanted to know if you were coming over for the funeral.’

‘Who?’

‘She didn’t say. I gave her the name of your hotel. Figured you wouldn’t mind.’

He grinned at me in the mirror, the boyish wickedness of the look confirming my sense of his inviolable innocence. Cord intact. I smiled back, trying to conceal the feeling of alarm that had come into me.

We picked up his children from his ex-wife’s apartment, then drove on to his garage. My mother, who was managing the business for him, had insisted on putting in a morning’s work before the funeral.

She was on the phone at a metal desk in a chilly office when we arrived; repeating out loud some customer’s list of mechanical ailments and typing them into a computer smudged all over with oily fingerprints. She had dyed her hair a coppery auburn colour. Her nails were long and red – the first time I had ever seen them painted. Exhaust pipes were stacked all around her on the cement floor. A stuffed pine marten crouched on the filing cabinet above her, under a calendar with a half-naked girl straddling a tyre. I stood, mesmerised. My mother! Was it possible? Though I had known from Otto’s occasional communications that she was working with him, I had pictured the job as something entirely genteel – a little light file indexing that Otto had charitably handed her to keep her occupied; something she might mention to her friends with a glint of irony calculated to express her indomitable spirit in the face of renewed adversity, but certainly nothing harsh enough to account for this apparently wholesale stepping out of character.

‘Hand brake slipping,’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘Power steering broken…’

Cradling the phone between her head and shoulder, she typed away with what seemed to me an almost ostentatiously ignoble proficiency. It struck me that she must have wanted me to come upon her like this: in situ, soldiering on. Even so, the sight of her in this new incarnation – unprepared as I was by any of the tentative preliminaries that had paved the way towards her earlier transformations – was a shock.

She got off the phone, gave me a brisk, jangling embrace, and at once began talking to Otto about the need to raise prices and increase inventory. Be advised that we are now members of the mercantile class, her demeanour seemed intended to convey, and we don’t have the luxury, unlike some people, to think about anything but the immediate material necessities of life.

Was her briskness an inverted sentimentality? I looked for some sign that being together in the flesh again after all these years was as great an upheaval for her as it was for me, but if it was, she managed to conceal it, and I retaliated with a briskness of my own.

The funeral was brief and low-key, though better attended than I had expected. During the silence in which the coffin was trundled off on its rollers, I heard a strange, raucous sob from the back of the room. Glancing around, I saw a man with tears streaming down his face. A woman beside him began dabbing his cheeks with a handkerchief and patting his hand. It took me a moment to realise that the man was my Uncle Heinrich, and the woman Kitty!

‘At least we were able to do that for her,’ my mother commented afterwards, as we hurried through the rain to Otto’s car. ‘Get the social services to pay her to look after him. And to give her credit, she’s very patient with him. He’s become extremely emotional, as you could see. Not that he would have had a clue who he was weeping for – he just picks up on the atmosphere. Kitty’s the only person he recognises now. Everyone else is a stranger he thinks he has to charm each time he meets them. You’ll see for yourself, no doubt.’

We drove to Otto’s apartment. Kitty arrived with Heinrich soon after us. She threw her arms around me. ‘Stefan! I’m so happy to see you!’ She had changed remarkably little: same lively grey eyes, same unaffected warmth in their expression. She had qualified as a nurse specialising in care of the elderly, she told me. She was married, to a nightclub manager. They had a boy aged ten. As we talked, the simple creaturely ease of our brief fling came back to me on a warm current of remembrance. I had no wish to rekindle things between us, and nor, I am sure, did she, but I felt an immense gladness that such an interlude had been permitted to occur in my life. Beside her my uncle hung awkwardly, an uncertain smile on his face. Physically he looked in excellent shape: trim and spruce, good colour, his brown three-piece suit as well-fitting on him as the bark of a healthy tree. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong with him. ‘Hello,’ I said, offering my hand. He took it, tilting his head questioningly. ‘I’m Stefan Vogel,’ I told him. He gave a little gallant bow: ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance. Isn’t this a jolly occasion? Are you a frequent habitué?’ I did my best to conduct a conversation with him, aware that for all my belief in his fundamental decency I bore him a great deal of ill will, and that his condition, far from diminishing this, was adding to it a layer of resentment for the fact that he had apparently succeeded in putting himself beyond all possible reckoning. After a few pleasantries had passed between us, a vacant look appeared on his face. He drew close to Kitty, standing behind her for the rest of the reception like a child cowering behind a parent, examining the contents of his pockets and from time to time glancing out at me mistrustfully.

The caller Otto had mentioned was waiting for me in the lobby of my hotel when I arrived there that evening, her slight frame bundled in a wet brown parka. A smirk crinkled her face as she caught my look of dismayed recognition. Margarete Menzer.

‘There you are. Good. I heard about your father. Condolences. Do you have time for a drink?’

I couldn’t think of an excuse, and lacked the bluntness to turn her down without one.

‘All right,’ I heard myself say.

We went into the hotel bar, a twilit place done up in sheet metal and rawhide, with a young crowd talking in loud voices over the pulsing beat of a synthetic drum.

‘Chic hotel,’ she said, grinning at a party of men with shaved heads and elaborate underlip topiary. ‘You must be selling lots of poems!’

‘It’s the cheapest place I could find.’

‘You mean with gold taps and a private sauna!’

We found a dark nook and ordered drinks. She drank quickly: white wine, then vodka. Her hair, more frizzy now than curly, was tinged with grey; a mass of little iron springs. Her eyes, though, darting to and fro like a bird’s above her sharp nose and chin, were black and shiny as ever. As they flickered over me, I felt the reassertion of the proprietorial interest she had taken in me from the start; the claim she had seemed to stake in me, as if recognising a member of her own species. ‘It’s good to see you again, Stefan,’ she said, patting me lightly on the knee. ‘I couldn’t resist the chance of catching up when I found out you were coming over. I hope you don’t mind?’ I shook my head, wanting only to get this over with as quickly as possible. She had become a journalist, she told me, a freelancer for an Internet publication. ‘Very cutting-edge,’ she said with a grin, by which I took her to mean that she had found her way back into her old element of rumour and innuendo. She was single, she declared suddenly, with the overemphatic candour of someone who has consciously disinhibited herself. She took off her parka, revealing a surprisingly flimsy lace blouse. In it, the Margarete of my no doubt feverishly suspicious imagination was briefly supplanted by a possibly more objective Margarete: human, lonely, trying to look her best. A vodka or two later, she was asking if the bedrooms here were as funkily decorated as this bar. Was I tempted to offer to show her? Only out of a certain morbid curiosity; to find out what it would be like to occupy the blackest end of the spectrum of my possible selves. I resisted: ‘No. They’re very boring.’ She chuckled. ‘Still happily married?’ ‘Extremely.’ ‘How nice.’ Far from driving her off, my coldness seemed to cement her presence. She ordered more drinks, unpacked cigarettes from her purse and sank back into her seat with a contented look, as if we had just agreed to make a night of drinking and gossip.

‘So,’ she said, ‘have you been back?’

‘Back where?’

‘Prenzlauer Berg, of course.’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t recognise it. All chichi boutiques now.’ She laughed, then gave a large, somewhat theatrical sigh: ‘What a time that was! Those poets! All those crazy friends of my brother’s, busy informing on each other day and night. No wonder they had a problem with plain language!’ She glanced at me. ‘You knew about that, right, the informing?’ ‘More or less.’ ‘My brother got most of the notoriety but they were all at it – Paul Boeden, Uwe Wardezky; Reinhard Kolbe’s father was the Firm’s own officer for cultural affairs!’ I listened impassively as she continued, my face a mask of neutral attentiveness. She knocked back her drink – something staged in the recklessness of the gesture, I remember thinking, as though she felt it necessary to go through the motions of relinquishing self-control, for appearances’ sake, before she could allow herself to unleash whatever mischief she had in mind. ‘And it wasn’t just the poets either,’ she continued. ‘Half the peace activists too. Sitting around discussing plans for some illegal anti-nuclear protest one minute, then scurrying off to tell their controls all about it! Hilarious, really! And nobody was above it. That’s my considered opinion. Nobody at all. Not me, not you, not anyone. Amazing what a little fear will do to people!’ She paused, drawing deeply on a cigarette and looking at me with a provocative grin, as if waiting for me to raise an objection. I was aware of a tightening in my chest, but I said nothing, not wanting to make things easier for her. ‘The theatre people also,’ she went on, blowing out her smoke, ‘none of them had their hands clean. Not a single person. Not one.’ She was locked on her target now, I could feel that; coursing forward on some riptide of malice. ‘Benno Mautner,’ she continued, ‘he’s the one who got the Stasi along for that swords-to-ploughshares performance -’

‘All right Margarete -’ I interrupted her.

‘What? You don’t remember? Where his actors all wore those insignias…’

‘I remember, but -’

‘But what? You don’t want to hear?’

‘Not really. I’m not that interested any more.’

‘Well, here’s something that’ll interest you -’

It occurs to me that if I had allowed her to seduce me she might have spared me this. A purely chivalrous infidelity, that would have been! Protect the honour of your beloved by going to bed with her rival… But on the other hand, given her and her brother’s peculiar gifts, she would more likely have found a way of having her cake and eating it.

‘I doubt it,’ I said.

‘Inge.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Yes. Your lovely wife. Not then, but later.’ Her eyes had darted up to gauge my reaction. ‘You didn’t know, did you? What I thought. Well, don’t go blaming her. She had every right to turn on Thilo after he dumped her like that. Still, I heard that without her testimony they wouldn’t have got the conviction that put him away. Your own contribution was apparently ruled inadmissible on account of your vested interest in the matter. You remember what sticklers for procedural correctness they were. Might as well have kept your hands clean! Wait – where are you going, Stefan? Have I upset you?’

I had stood up, and was putting on my coat.

‘Don’t be upset! No one cares about this shit any more -’

‘Go to hell, Margarete,’ I said, turning my back on her.

My body was trembling. I strode back across the lobby and on out through the revolving doors to the street. There was no question of my believing Margarete’s repulsive slander, but just hearing it spoken, hearing Inge’s name dragged like a shot-down swan through the mire of this goblinous procuress’s vindictive imagination, was unbearable. If I could have foreseen that her brother was going to blackmail me a few years later, on precisely the basis of Inge’s untarnished integrity, her absolute dissimilarity from myself and all these other fiends, I would have flung that in her face too (though, come to think of it, maybe my visceral reaction to Margarete’s lies was in fact what gave Menzer the idea that I might be susceptible to blackmail in the first place!). I felt nauseous, dizzy, disgusted. Plunging blindly up past the Gendarmenmarkt, I found myself heading east on what must have been Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, then before I knew it, crossing Alexanderplatz to Prenzlauer Allee. Only here did any thought of revisiting the old neighbourhood come to mind, and even then it was more a kind of helpless, passive gravitation than anything considered. The rain had thinned to a wet mist in which the new illuminations of the quarter shone glassily. Here were Saarbrücker Strasse, Metzer Strasse, Strassburger Strasse – so familiar and yet all so changed, as though I had travelled back in time only to find the past itself altered. The old brick warehouse with its barred portholes was gone, in its place a French parfumerie, the display cabinets behind its plate-glass window shedding a violet glow. I stared in, trying to picture the interior as it had been: an effort at first, as though the image were ashamed of its plainness in the face of the luxurious resplendence that had usurped it, and reluctant to be exhumed. But after a while I found myself imagining again the dark, tatty auditorium that had once occupied this space, and from there I was able to summon the figure of Inge as I had first beheld her, bringing her to mind in all her savage purity, until I could feel her luminous, incandescent spirit flooding into me once again, unblemished, purging the corrosive poison of Margarete’s words, and shining inside me with the light of an inextinguishable reprieve. I can say in all truth that it has been burning there steadily ever since: my own figure of Liberty, standing sentinel at the threshold of my own incorruptible America.