Seven Lies

CHAPTER 2

So much for my family’s glorious ascent into the international political elite of New York.

To my mother’s credit, she never directly reproached my father, but the tragic aura she assumed from then on must have been a living reproach to him, and even if it wasn’t, he certainly subjected himself to enough reproach of his own. Quite a rapid change came over him: he continued to work hard (he was sent back to the Friendship Treaties, and the subsequent agreements on technology-sharing with other Warsaw Pact countries), but under what seemed a steadily thickening glaze of failure. He wasn’t the type to respond to criticism from his superiors with defiance or countercriticism. What he seemed to want were opportunities to show his loyalty and diligence, if not in order to be reinstated, then at least to be acknowledged as a faithful servant. At the same time, though, he had obviously lost his self-confidence, and with it the air of quiet capability that had once impressed people, so that even if his blunder had been forgiven, he was clearly no longer suitable for a high-level career in the diplomatic service. His appearance grew shabbier. He aged. There was something distracted and disconcertingly meek in the way he smiled.

As for my mother’s ‘tragic aura’, it was a complex thing; a hybrid, I believe, of real disappointment, and a kind of tactical reorganisation of her forces. There was humility in it – just enough to deflect the Schadenfreude or downright vengeful delight of her acquaintances, and to convert what had formerly been a rather too flagrant haughtiness into something more subtle and sombre and dignified. If she could no longer intimidate people by the suggestion of hidden powers in her possession, she could make them respect her out of consideration for the magnitude of our loss. She made a point of telling our friends and neighbours what had happened, always in a tone of sad but unselfpitying acceptance of our misfortune, thereby establishing the event in terms that were acceptable to her, and gaining control over people’s reactions to it.

It was at this time that the word ‘intellectual’ first entered her active vocabulary. Pretty soon it was joined by other, similar words, such as ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’. ‘So and so is an intellectual fraud,’ she might be heard saying, or ‘So and so has no aesthetic sense whatsoever.’

At first these remarks had a tentative quality, like somebody trying out a new way of dressing and pretending not to be anxious about what others might think. But people seemed to accept them without protest, and the self-consciousness soon left her. Before long it was apparent that she had constructed a new hierarchy of values by which to organise the world in a manner that once again accorded with her invincible sense of our family’s worth. If we were not to take our place in the inner circle of the political elite, then so be it: we would dazzle and confound others from our eminence in the sphere of real merit, which was to say the sphere of culture and ideas and, above all, Art.

Given that none of us had accomplished anything at all in this sphere, her successful transformation of our whole tone and image as a family must be counted as quite a triumph. Her own education had been a ramshackle affair, interrupted by the war (though she claimed to have had a tutor at the age of eleven who had made her read ‘everything’), but her brother Heinrich had been through university, and at one time contemplated a career as a man of letters. He still subscribed to the official literary publications, and in his position as senior counsel at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, he had easy access to the best artistic circles, which from time to time he still frequented. Naturally my mother enlisted him in her new project. And doting on her as he did (he had no family of his own), he was happy to oblige.

A new phase of our life began. Uncle Heinrich introduced my mother to a number of officially recognised writers and artists of his acquaintance. We dutifully made the round of their plays, concerts and exhibitions, mingling with them afterwards, and before long they began appearing at our apartment on Micklenstrasse. Naturally obsequious as a breed, and knowing of my mother only that she was the sister of an important government functionary who took an interest in the arts, they were never difficult to entice. In a remarkably short space of time, through sheer force of will, as well as that curious hypnotic power of suggestion that gathered people like sheep into her private fantasies, she turned our household into a gravitational centre for artists and intellectuals of every stripe. My father acquiesced in his meek way. Once, timidly, he asked if she was sure she wasn’t going to ‘receive disadvantage’ for associating with the wrong types, but he was quickly silenced by her acid retort that she hardly thought her brother would be introducing her to charlatans of the kind he was obviously referring to.

The apartment itself underwent a transformation. Framed prints and reproductions went up. In time, as my mother’s patronage grew, artists began presenting her with original oils and watercolours, and these joined the reproductions on the walls. There were even some sculptures which, like the paintings, were both representational and at the same time sufficiently unrealistic in their distortions and bulbous excrescences to indicate that their creators were fully abreast of the latest developments in modern art. Furthermore, they were uniformly of what I would call an ‘aspiring’ tone. Eyes and hands were often raised upwards in a slyly sublime manner. The darker, more turbulent works were sure to have gleams of light peeping over some horizon in the background.

The most ‘aspiring’ of them all was a life-sized bronze statue representing a naked female dancer reaching towards the heavens. Her arms and hands were immensely thin and elongated, as if the intensity of her ‘aspiration’ had literally stretched her about five inches. Her thin legs were more like a flamingo’s than a human’s. Interestingly, though, as if distracted from his lofty purpose by a momentary lasciviousness, the artist had endowed her with full, upward-curving, gravity-defying breasts, which he had very carefully modelled to show the nipples and areolas in minute detail. Otto in particular was fascinated by these breasts, and when our parents were not about, he would entertain me by slinking up behind the girl and grabbing hold of them, murmuring delirious blandishments into her bronze ear. Kitty was embarrassed by her, and could be made to blush when circumstances forced her to acknowledge her presence. My father also objected to her, ostensibly on the grounds that she occupied more than her fair share of the living room. But my mother had pronounced this figure an ‘aesthetic triumph’, and we were given notice that anyone who criticised her ran the risk of being stigmatised as ‘visually blind’ – one of her most deadly put-downs at this time.

It was during this period that I first heard myself being referred to as the family ‘poet-intellectual’. It was done so casually that I didn’t consciously notice it until it had insinuated its way into my own image of myself. I therefore didn’t react to it with the suspicion or perplexity I should have. As our artistic gatherings consolidated themselves into regular soirées and I heard my mother introduce me as our ‘literary man’, our own ‘poet-intellectual’, often adding, ‘He reads all the time. It’s impossible to drag him away from a book once he’s started; just like I was at his age,’ I felt it as one of those immemorial truths about oneself that are so well established they are almost too boring to mention. It was as if she had said, He’s rather small for his age, or He’s always had a sweet tooth. The fact that I had never written a poem, and that I never read a book unless I had to for class, was neither here nor there. The idea was like one of those cloud-forest plants that subsist on air and light alone. It appeared to require no nourishment from reality in order to grow, either in my own mind or in the minds of our acquaintances. Before long it became absorbed into the conversational ritual at our monthly soirées, where guests suffering from the slight awkwardness entailed in talking to the adolescent children of their hostess could now inquire after my poetry. ‘How’s the writing going?’ they might say with a look of respectful concern – or, more facetiously, with a little motion of their wrists, ‘Still scribbling away?’ – to which I would respond with a vague nod and what I hoped was a tantalisingly elusive smile, before changing the subject.

There was an upright piano in the corner of the living room, and from time to time there would be music at our gatherings: a solo recital by some budding young pianist, or a trio or quartet if others brought instruments. Given the obdurately stiff, formal, frosty tenor of the conversational part of the soirées, these interludes were a relief to the company and always greatly appreciated. One day a lull descended on the room when there happened to be no musicians present. A writer named Franz Erhardt stepped forward and ‘begged permission’ to read us something from his novel, which he had brought with him. Permission was granted, and he began to read.

He was a small, sallow man with a forked beard and light blue eyes that always seemed to be at work on some caustic or double-edged little observation. My mother had found him a job at the state TV company, and he told me once, with a strange sort of rueful sneer, that he occasionally dreamed of her, ‘just as the English dream of their queen’. I understand that he went on to become quite a success in the literary world of the GDR, and that by the time the Wall came down he was a top-ranking bureaucrat in the Writers’ Union, with guaranteed sales of a hundred thousand copies of every novel he wrote. A few years ago I read in the New York Times that he had hanged himself after his Stasi file had been opened, revealing that he had been an informer for most of his adult life. I remember that the novel he read from that evening was a strange sort of satirical spoof, unusual in those days of solid socialist realism, taking as its premise President Kennedy’s famous statement ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ and imagining a patrician American with Kennedy’s decadent appetites and corrupt ideas getting stuck in East Berlin and suffering a series of instructive mishaps that finally turn him into a good and happy socialist.

Judging from the hearty laughter that filled the room, it had plenty of funny jokes. I myself was too young to understand them. Besides, I was distracted. There was something about the very fact of this reading – a novelty in our drawing room – that was making me uneasy. I noticed my Uncle Heinrich staring at me pensively once or twice across the room. For some time I had been dimly aware of his interest in me growing more intense, as if my ‘writing’ and his own former literary ambitions made us kindred spirits. He would often talk to me about writers he admired, sometimes discussing his own youthful efforts, and telling me how much he looked forward to reading something of mine. For my part the whole subject occupied such a dreamy, subterranean part of my consciousness that I find it almost hard to accuse myself of active hypocrisy in allowing him to continue in his delusions about me.

But as I watched him now, his cropped head with its elegant, gaunt features and silver-grey eyes roving attentively between Erhardt, the enrapt guests and myself, I had a faintly sickening sensation that some hidden and intimate area of myself that I had until now considered inviolably private was about to be forcibly exposed to public view.

Sure enough, as soon as the reading was over and the applause had begun to die down, I heard my uncle’s rather high-pitched voice with its clipped enunciation, calling to me from across the room.

‘Stefan, young fellow, what about you? Why don’t you read something of yours now?’ He was looking at me with a kindly expression – there was always something very proper and clean and good-natured about him; merry, one might almost say – but at that moment his smiling face seemed to me full of menace and barely concealed cruelty. I remember observing the same dignified and innocent expression of warmth on his face and feeling the same chilled response in my own heart many years later, when I was brought to him in his comfortable rooms at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, where once again I found myself at a loss to circumvent some request that from his point of view was wholly reasonable, while to me it seemed to stretch the already abused fabric of my soul to the point of ripping it altogether in two.

His suggestion was immediately taken up by the other guests.

‘Yes, what a good idea,’ a voice cried out. ‘Frau Vogel, ask your son to read us one of his compositions.’

‘I – I don’t have anything prepared,’ I stammered. But my apparent modesty merely fanned the flames of their interest, and I soon found myself at the centre of a chorus of bantering remarks about my shyness and lack of spontaneity. ‘Come on, Stefan, read us something from this great work we’ve been hearing so much about,’ someone called, while another, to my mortification, said, ‘Otto, fetch your brother’s poems. He’s too modest to get them himself.’

Otto turned to this speaker with the look of surly impassiveness that he had been perfecting over the past year. He too had been a target for my mother’s ‘artistic’ reinvention of our family. Since he had always been good with his hands, he was chosen to represent the pictorial muse. He had been sent to drawing classes and presented with a box of high-grade French charcoals and some handmade paper sketchbooks finagled by my mother through our surviving connections in the higher levels of the privilegentsia. After the first few classes he had abruptly refused to attend any more. My mother tried to change his mind, but he stood his ground. Even when she rather unsubtly attempted to pander to his burgeoning interest in girls by offering to find him a class with live nude models, he resisted. And when finally she threatened to punish him if he didn’t keep at it, he broke the charcoals, ripped the sketchbooks to pieces and exploded at her with such savage virulence that she – even she – had been forced to back down. Otto now occupied an anomalous, private, decultured zone within the family: tolerated, but not much more.

I’m not sure whether I simply lacked his courage to be himself, or whether I had allowed myself to become tainted by the thought that I might actually be that potent and glamorous thing, an artist. Perhaps, despite my shyness and horror of exposure, I secretly craved the kind of attention that had just been lavished on Franz Erhardt. Instead of coming out and confessing that I didn’t in fact have anything to read to the assembled company, I merely stood there, inwardly writhing, unable to speak, while the guests continued baying at me from all corners of the room.

It was my father, to my surprise, who saved me, though it would certainly have been better for me in the long run if he hadn’t.

‘Perhaps next time, Stefan, eh?’ he said quietly. ‘That way you’ll have time to prepare something for us.’

It was so rare for him to assert himself in any way at these gatherings that I think people in their uncertainty attributed more authority to him than he actually possessed. He was deferred to: the baying stopped, and with a few waggings of fingers and stern warnings not to forget, I was given a month’s reprieve.

AS THE DAYS passed, the question of how I was going to acquit myself at the next soirée grew rapidly from a faint unease to a consuming preoccupation that soon formed the single focus of my life. Theoretically it still would have been possible to own up to my lack of material and back down, but as I have often felt when faced with a choice between a healthy and a harmful course of action, I had the distinct sensation of the harm having already been done, without my conscious consent or even participation, so that the apparent choice was in fact no choice at all. At any rate, the thought of making a clean breast of things, disgracing myself before my mother and looking foolish in front of her friends barely crossed my mind. With the same odd mixture of submissiveness and furtive ambition, I lay awake at nights, next to my sleeping brother, racking my brains for a solution. I had tried the most rational thing: to sit down and write. But it had become painfully clear to me that whatever faculties of imagination and verbal ingenuity were required to bring something even remotely coherent, let alone interesting, into existence on a blank page, I was entirely devoid of them. The feeling I’d had as I sat at my table trying to coax words out of myself was more than simply one of impotence; it was a kind of vast, inverted potency: the sheer inert mass of blankness that I had attempted to breach reverberating violently back through me, as though I had tried to smash through a steel door with my fist. I soon gave up.

It was on a morning a few days before the soirée that my anxiety, roused by now to a condition in which it actually functioned as a kind of substitute imagination, formed the first in what turned out to be a long series of dubious solutions, each of which immediately raised new and more serious problems.

As Kitty opened the larder in search of some jam for my mother’s toast, I happened to glimpse the double row of aquavit bottles at the back of the top shelf. Unreplenishable since my father’s fall from grace, these had now acquired the value of precious heirlooms, and my parents were extremely sparing in their use of them as bribes. From the sight of these bottles, my mind turned to Herr Brandt, and from him to the last expedition Otto and I had made to the basement, in search of the von Riesen linen. And suddenly I remembered those leather-bound volumes of World Poetry in Translation.

That afternoon, during the quiet hour after my return from school, when my parents were both out and Kitty was in her room enjoying a moment of leisure before preparing our dinner, I stole one of the little frosted-glass bottles from the larder and went downstairs to ask Brandt for the key to the storage room. He stared at me, so long, and with such vacant dullness, that for a moment I wondered if he now considered it so far beneath his dignity to acknowledge me that I had actually become invisible to him. But eventually he gave his weary sigh and got up to accompany me.

Doing my best to imitate my brother’s confident, worldly tone, I told him I could manage on my own, if he would just give me the key. I took out the aquavit bottle and nonchalantly offered it to him. ‘Here, this is for you. Compliments of the house.’ A glint of something approaching amusement appeared in his eye. My contemptible absurdity had apparently just sunk to new depths of preposterousness. He took the bottle with a disdainful shrug of his heavy, soft shoulders. I waited for him to give me the key, but he merely looked at the bottle, wiping the mist from the frosted glass with the pad of a thumb so fleshy and nail-bitten it looked like one of those pastries where the risen dough all but engulfs the dab of jelly at its centre.

‘Could I have the key, please?’ I asked, attempting to control a faint tremor in my voice. Herr Brandt smiled and raised two obese fingers. ‘Zwei Flaschen,’ he said, ‘one for privacy, one for the key.’ It struck me that the peculiar warped affinity that existed between us had somehow made it apparent to him that I was here on personal rather than family business, and with his lugubrious but unerring instinct for such things, he realised he had found an opportunity for extortion. Aware of my own powerlessness as well as the jeopardy I had placed myself in, I swallowed my protests and went silently back upstairs for a second bottle.

Kitty was now in the kitchen peeling potatoes. It was imperative that I get her out immediately: I sensed that if I were gone longer than a minute or two Brandt would consider himself justified in renegotiating the terms. I could picture exactly the ponderous way he would look at his watch and shrug off any attempt to hold him to his word. As is often the case with me, acute necessity brought forth invention – or at least a short-term expedient. I remembered that Kitty had been unhappy a few weeks ago when some man she had been seeing had suddenly vanished. Tearfully she had admitted to my mother that the man had been a member of a group that met once a week in a church to discuss world peace. Thinking he had been arrested, she had begged my mother to use her influence to help him. My mother had retorted with a stern lecture on the impropriety of a member of our household having anything to do with such a person, and that was the last I had heard of the matter.

‘Jürgen’s outside,’ I told Kitty. ‘He asked me to come and get you. He’s in the alley by the coal-hole. He looks like he’s been living rough.’

Gasping, Kitty ran out of the room, her hands still wet from the potatoes. I took the second bottle, rearranging some canned celery to fill the space at the end of the row, and, with a feeling of venom in my heart, went back downstairs.

This time I was careful not to give Brandt the bottle until I had the key. Even so, he managed to make me jump through one more hoop. Instead of actually handing me the key, he merely pointed to the bunch hanging at his waist and told me to come and unhook it myself. This I did, reluctantly, but feeling that I had no choice. As I fumbled with the key ring, I was unpleasantly aware of his sour smell and the soft paunch of his stomach wobbling against the back of my wrist.

With the key finally in my hand, I went down to the basement. Only one of the two bulbs hanging in the storeroom worked, and the place was gloomier than ever. The trunk’s brasswork gleamed faintly among the shadowy bric-a-brac of our cubicle. I opened the lid, releasing the familiar musty odour, and took out the six-volume set of World Poetry in Translation. There was no question of bringing these upstairs: even if I had found somewhere to hide them, they would have been discovered. My mother had once discovered a West German comic book under Otto’s mattress, and since then she had been in the habit of regularly turning the place upside down. I had brought a pencil and paper with me, my plan being to copy out one of the prose translations down here, and convert it into poetry upstairs. If anyone saw the copied-out translation, I would claim it was ‘notes’ for a poem.

With this in mind, I tipped one of the volumes to the light and began looking through it. I was searching for something that conformed in spirit to the quasi-abstract but unequivocally ‘upward-aspiring’ tenor of the artworks favoured in our home. I read quickly, aware that the longer I took, the more likely it was that I would have to account for my absence. Many years later, I heard a literature professor on the radio declare that the only valid criterion for judging a piece of writing was whether it could ‘save your life’. Remembering my feverish ransacking of these volumes in the grainy darkness of the storeroom, I felt that I understood exactly what he was talking about.

I found what I was looking for, copied it out, put away the volumes and ran back upstairs, returning the key to Brandt.

Kitty was back. So, fortunately, was my mother, making it temporarily impossible for Kitty to question me about my alleged encounter with Jürgen. She gave me an anguished look, which I ignored. Just before dinner, I found her waiting for me as I came out of the bathroom. ‘He wasn’t there,’ she whispered. I tried to look surprised. ‘Maybe someone recognised him. He seemed nervous.’ ‘You said he looked -’ Kitty managed, breaking off guiltily as my mother came out of the kitchen.

She regarded us a moment. The notion of Kitty and myself having any kind of relationship independent of the rest of the household, let alone something to whisper about, clearly both surprised and disturbed her. With a little movement at the back of her protruberant eyes, suggestive to me of a camera shutter opening and closing, she seemed to absorb the situation and store it away for further reflection, before ushering us on into dinner.

It was our custom to sit in the living room after dinner and listen to the latest instalment of one of the Russian novels that were continually being serialised on the radio. My father would sit back in his armchair with a glass of plum alcohol and pass into what seemed a state of innocent, genuine contentment. My mother fidgeted, torn between a sense that there might be something not altogether highbrow about this method of ingesting culture, and the relish she took in telling people that this was how we passed our evenings as a family. (When she did this, she would deliberately stress the humble nature of the entertainment, implying, with her genius for suggestion, something simultaneously populist and austere in our tastes.) Perched restlessly on her chair, she would nod gravely at the passages of sententious generalisation, smile mysteriously at odd moments, as if to suggest an attunement to notes of humour too rarefied for the rest of us to catch, and sometimes sigh, ‘Ah, yes,’ apparently remembering a passage from her numerous readings of the book in her youth. Otto and I sat for the most part stupefied with boredom, though lately Otto had begun paying more attention. Since entering adolescence, he had made a private cargo cult out of any scraps of drama that could possibly be construed as erotic, hoarding them away for use in his private fantasies, and continually on the lookout for more. Kitty was seldom present: she usually went out in the evenings; if not, she stayed in her room.

That evening I announced that I would not be joining the family in the living room. I waited to be asked why, and with a joyful sense of importance answered that I needed to work on one of my poems. A bright, shining truth that seemed to bathe me in a fluorescent aura as I uttered it. I was immediately excused.

In my room, I took the prose translation from my pocket and set to work. The name of the poet I had stumbled on, and who, in the company of one or two others, was to prove so fatefully useful to me over the next few months, meant nothing to me at the time. But just as our janitor had for many years provided me with my mental image of the West German chancellor, simply because he bore the same name (leading to a great pang of bittersweet surprise when I first saw the exquisite, civilised, elfin face of Willy Brandt in the newspapers on the occasion of his momentous visit to Erfurt in 1970), so between Walt Disney (a controversial, if not actually unmentionable name at that time) and the word ‘Witz’, meaning joke or wit, I formed the image of my stolen poetic persona as a kind of goofy, playful, disreputably capitalistic character. Though I couldn’t read English, I had noticed that his lines were long, uneven and unrhymed. On a whim, I decided to reverse each of these qualities. Almost as soon as I began, I found myself strangely enjoying it – not that I discovered any great talent for producing short, regular, rhyming lines, but the very process of this weird inversion had a peculiarly natural, almost familiar feeling about it, as though I had already been doing it for years.

While I was happily working away, the door opened and Kitty came quietly into the room. Needless to say, she was after more information about her beloved Jürgen. What exactly did he say? What was his tone of voice? What had he been wearing? I sensed that she wanted the truth to match the romantic quality of her own feelings for the man. Since I was the sole source of this ‘truth’, I had it in my power either to bestow or to withhold what she wanted. It was unusual for me to find myself in a position of power over another human being. I was aware of it not so much in the Brandt sense of something to gloat over and exploit, as of a kind of transformative agent: a means of introducing a sudden and extreme volatility into a hitherto static situation. ‘Well, his exact words were just, “Ask Kitty to come down and see me,”’ I told her, ‘but the way he said them was as though seeing you was the most important thing to him in the world.’ I remembered she had knitted a red scarf for him, and I added that he was wearing that. A look of ardent longing came into her eyes. Gratitude also. She was perhaps twenty-six, not well educated, but in her quiet way fuelled by a passionate vitality that made her presence in a room always a positive enhancement. I knew that Otto had reassessed her lately from the point of view of his emerging sexuality, and found her to be desirable. As she looked at me, her eyes brightening with everything I said, I felt a kind of vicarious desire – as if I were Otto – and a corresponding rise in the value of the power I was wielding. Had I actually been Otto, I could surely have turned this situation to my advantage. Not least because Kitty, unsophisticated soul that she was, seemed at some level to be confusing me – the conveyor of pleasurable tidings – with Jürgen himself. For a moment the room seemed to brim with potentialities, as the two of us populated it with emblems of ourselves, each other, Otto and Jürgen, all conversing with one another. I felt that I was being given a foretaste of the world of adult passions, and a strong excitement came into me.

Footsteps approached. Kitty abruptly left the room. I heard my mother say ‘Hello, Kitty,’ in a bemused tone. She then appeared in my doorway.

‘What are you and Kitty up to? You seem to be whispering like a pair of conspirators whenever I see you.’

She was smiling with her mouth open. She had two smiles: a close-mouthed smile for formal occasions, and an open-mouthed, vulnerably toothy smile for when she was being a mother on intimate terms with her children. I sensed, however, something duplicitous in her choice of smile now, as though she felt guilty about her compulsion to pry, or at any rate was trying to disguise it as innocent curiosity.

‘What were you talking about?’

‘Oh, nothing serious,’ I said, racking my brains for something to tell her when she questioned me more forcefully, as I knew she would.

‘Please tell me what you were talking about.’

‘Kitty wants to knit something special for your birthday,’ I managed to lie. ‘She was asking me what I thought you would like.’

This silenced her for a moment. Seizing the advantage, I told her that Kitty had wanted the gift to be a surprise, and that now we had spoiled that. My mother looked uncomfortable, distressed even, and for a moment I felt an almost overwhelming urge to confess to all the absurd, trivial, but increasingly exhausting deceits her encouragement of my poetry had engendered.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘we won’t say a word to Kitty, and I’ll act completely surprised on my birthday. Tell her to make me a matching hat, scarf and gloves. Blue, with white falcons on.’

And so that subsidiary chain reaction of unpleasantnesses finally petered out. Except that Kitty had to spend all her free time over the next few weeks knitting woollens for my mother.

MEANWHILE, the main sequence continued. The month passed, and preparations began for the next soirée. Eggs were hard-boiled and sprinkled with paprika. Chunks of canned Cuban pineapple were rolled in slices of ham. ‘Plain, honest fare,’ my mother would say as she served various combinations of these things. ‘None of your Central Committee foie gras in this household.’ As always in her assertions of humility, family self-esteem was maintained by the unstated, counter-vailing facts of the matter, which were that for most of our visitors, even these relatively modest items represented a gastronomic treat.

It was November – windy and wet. Out of the bleary Berlin night guests began arriving, stamping their chilly feet in the hall, hanging their water-absorbent GDR raincoats on our iron coat rack.

I was in an agitated state. The idea of actually having to stand up in front of these people and reveal the fruits of my dubious labours was suddenly beginning to fill me with fear. For the first time it struck me that somebody might expose me as a fraud.

Uncle Heinrich hadn’t arrived – his work often kept him late. I moved among the guests with waves of tension floating through my stomach. To my surprise, no one mentioned the performance they had made me promise to give. Either they had all forgotten, or – as I began to suspect – they had reached a tacit agreement among themselves to let the matter drop. Did they feel sorry for having pressured me? Or was it that they were really not very interested in hearing me read after all? Despite my anxieties, I found myself strangely resenting both of these possibilities. After an hour or so, I saw Uncle Heinrich’s official limo – an old Czech Tatra – pull up on the street below. He came in, his usual kindly self, apologising for his lateness with a humility that never failed to flatter these people, any one of whom he could have destroyed with no more than his signature on a piece of paper.

He greeted me warmly, but he too failed to mention my promised reading. My deepening stage fright was compounded by a new anxiety, that I might not actually be called to the stage at all. The milk of human kindness may not have flowed in our household, but the milk of judicious approval for prowess in sanctioned fields could occasionally be made to trickle. It was the only nourishment going, and I evidently thirsted for it.

Across the room I saw Franz Erhardt speaking with my uncle. I drifted over. Erhardt watched me approach, smiling thinly as I arrived, without pausing in his talk. I felt sure that he of all people could not have forgotten my reading, and was deliberately avoiding the subject out of professional rivalry. I could feel him willing me to leave, but I stood my ground. Eventually I looked at my watch and sighed so ostentatiously that they were obliged to notice.

‘What is it, dear boy?’ my uncle asked, concerned.

‘Oh, nothing. Just that – well, I suppose I’m going to have to get those poems out. I’ve been dreading this.’

‘Poems? Oh! Of course! Your reading!’

‘I’d really rather not do it, Uncle Heinrich.’

‘Nonsense! No backing down now!’ He wagged a finger at me and summoned my mother over.

‘Stefan promised to read to us. I’d quite forgotten. Now he’s trying to wriggle out of it again.’

My mother looked at me. It seemed to me there was a little movement, a vague twinge of guilt, in the expressive depths of her eyes, as if she were at the point of supporting me in my alleged reluctance, as my father had the month before. Before she could speak, though, I shrugged my shoulders and said with an air of defeat:

‘All right, I’ll read them, if that’s what you all want.’

I went to fetch the pages from my room. When I returned, the guests had been assembled in a circle around the piano, where Erhardt had read the previous month.

I had never addressed an audience before. My mouth had gone dry and my heart was pounding in my chest. The rows of people before me resembled nothing so much as the teeth of a gaping shark, ready to tear me apart. I wanted to flee from it, but it seems I also wanted to put my head in its mouth.

I managed to recite what I had written. The guests listened in silence, and when I finished there was applause.

For the record, the English equivalent of the lines I concocted would have sounded something like this:

I celebrate myself, myself I sing

And my beliefs are yours, as everything

I have is yours, each atom. So we laze -

My soul and I – passing the summer days

Observing spears of grass…

And so on – an anodyne burble that was clearly too boring to raise suspicion. At any rate, nobody unmasked me.

But I realised almost as soon as it was over that not everything was as it had been before. The room may have been the same – the atmosphere of simulated conviviality certainly felt unchanged – but I myself was changed.

At first I didn’t understand what had happened, but as the evening continued, with every guest obliged to make some kind of congratulatory remark, I realised that my attitude towards other people had undergone a radical alteration. Quite simply, the straightforward relation of cordial respect, or at least neutral interest, that is supposed to exist between people who have no prior reason not to respect each other was no longer available to me. It was gone, as if a cord had been cut. In its place, it seemed, was an intricately shuttling machinery of silent interrogation and devious concealment. Everyone I spoke to seemed newly illuminated by what I had done. Depending on certain minute signals given off by the movement of their eyes or the inflection of their voices (I felt suddenly attuned to these things), they were disclosed either as fellow hypocrites in whom the cord had also been cut (they had seen through my deception but weren’t saying so), or else as innocent fools (they hadn’t the guile to see through my deception). I was no doubt wrong in most of my individual diagnoses, but the idea that such a division might exist – between those in whom the cord has been cut, and those in whom it remains intact – was a revelation, and I still find myself appraising the people I meet on that basis.

My Uncle Heinrich, whose voluble enthusiasm for my performance led me to categorise him among the innocents, proposed that I should give another recital soon, since this one had been such a success. The proposal was immediately seconded by the person he was talking to, and by the logic of escalation that prevails in circumstances where power alone has meaning, someone else then had to suggest that I do it the very next month, only to have someone else trump them by saying I should do it every month. ‘That way we’ll all be able to witness first-hand the development of your young prodigy, Frau Vogel.’ And before I knew it, I was looking at the prospect of my little act of stealth, which I had thought would now be cast off into the back-draft of history, having instead to be repeated, month after month after month.

There was one small upset before the soirée ended. A guest went into the bathroom and discovered Otto slumped on the floor, dead drunk. He had passed out while throwing up into the toilet.

Otherwise, the evening was considered a triumph, and for the next period of my life I devoted most of my energies to maintaining the façade of ‘poet-intellectual’ that my mother’s warped pride had created and that I now began to half believe in myself.

It was a peculiar kind of drudgery – exhausting, depleting, and yet somehow compulsive. Like an inhabitant of hell – the hell of Sisyphus and Tantalus – I had a task, a labour, all of my own, and I felt inextricably bound to it. In its service life became a series of furtive routines. The stealing of the aquavit. The concealment of the theft. The bribing of Brandt. The removal of the key from his waist. The dark half hour in the storage room where I opened the trunk and copied the selected pages. The turning of the pages into ‘poetry’. And then finally the nacreous glory of my monthly soul-bath in that crowd of admiring, captive faces.

A few years later, when I was making a private study of the career of Joseph Stalin, I came across descriptions of his seventieth birthday: the enormous portrait of him suspended over Moscow from a balloon, lit up at night by searchlights; the special meeting of the Soviet Academy of Sciences honouring ‘the greatest genius of the human race’… The festivities culminated in a gala at the Bolshoi Theatre where the leaders of all the world’s communist parties stood up one by one to make elaborately flattering speeches to Stalin, and lavish him with gifts. One can imagine his state of mind as he sat on the stage receiving these tributes – the absolute disbelief in the sincerity of a single word being uttered; the compulsive need to hear them none the less; the antennae bristlingly attuned to the slightest lapse in the effort to portray conviction…

It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator.