Seven Lies

CHAPTER 4

Already largely absent from us in spirit, my father began to absent himself physically at this time. He let it be known at work that he was available for the least desired assignments, and began spending weeks at a time at convocations of minor functionaries in Sofia and Bucharest. My mother appeared not to notice, or at least not to mind, continuing indefatigably along the path she had chosen for herself. And then one day, when my father was away on one of his trips, she announced to us over dinner that he would not be coming back to live with us. He had fallen in love with another woman, she informed us drily, a colleague in his department. When he returned to Berlin he and my mother would be divorced, she told us, and he would be moving in with his colleague.

None of us had had any inkling of this, and we pressed my mother for more details, but she appeared to have taken the position that the event was nothing more than a minor annoyance, and the less said about it the better. Unsentimentality over matters of the heart was a point of pride among the educated classes in the former GDR, and my mother’s behaviour was doubtless an attempt to prove herself a superior adherent to this code. It must have cost her something, though: when Kitty suddenly burst into tears at the table, my mother told her extremely sharply to stop. There was a moment’s silence. Then her own eyes – to her apparent astonishment – filled with tears (the first and last time any of us beheld such a phenomenon), and she abruptly left the room. A stoical dryness was soon restored, however, and after that she contrived to give a characteristically lofty appearance of being above such commonplace emotions as wounded pride, petty vengefulness, or plain sorrow.

For the most part life continued unaltered after my father’s departure, but there was one significant change. Although she may have considered it beneath her to display any personal response to the event, my mother seemed to feel that some kind of ‘official’ response was called for, just as a government is sometimes obliged to respond to some event its individual ministers are personally indifferent to, for the sake of the public’s sense of balance. The response she settled on was a temporary suspension of her soirées. In this, as in all matters, there was no doubt a strategic motive: namely that their resumption, whenever it came, would be seen as a triumph over adversity. But whatever the case, I was abruptly liberated from my treadmill. No more fraught recitals, no more forgery, no more furtive dalliances with Brandt in the dark basement with its little mice and moths and beetles writhing and blinking on their glue traps all around us.

Suddenly, effortlessly, it was over. Almost too effortlessly, perhaps. With the feeling of a prisoner let out of his dungeon only to be told that the door had never in fact been locked, I drifted back up to the surface of my life, utterly bewildered.

Here, I discovered, things had been proceeding in quite momentous ways, apparently without need of my active participation. At school in particular, where I had been coasting for some time in a state of almost narcoleptic dreaminess, my life really did seem to have taken on a life of its own.

Ours was one of the elite high schools of Berlin, reserved for children of party officials. We had the best technical and athletic equipment, as well as the most highly qualified teachers, at our disposal, and it was expected that we would follow in the footsteps of our devout, industrious parents. Foreign and domestic dignitaries were constantly being wheeled into our morning assembly to impress on us the heroic nature of our destiny. Abrassimov, the Soviet ambassador, pinned Red Star badges on our chests one morning, carrying himself with the fantastical frostiness he was famous for, and that he evidently thought appropriate to his viceregal status in our republic. Alexander Schalck-Golodowski came to talk to us about so-called ‘German-German’ relations. Erich Mielke, Politburo Member for Security, led us in our Pioneer Greeting one morning, before going on to address us on the joys of a career in counterintelligence. Guenter Mittag came to us from Economic Affairs… Illustrious names once; names to conjure with, their mere utterance sufficient to induce that sensation of awe reserved for remote, solemn powers – all gone now, disgraced, ridiculed, forgotten.

My mother’s visit to my class at the time of our abortive move to New York turned out to have had one lasting effect: it had seriously compromised my position among my classmates. Although I hadn’t been actively shunned, I had been put into a kind of social quarantine, a limbo-like condition where I was under close scrutiny pending the appearance of further symptoms that would indicate a full-blown case of unpopularity.

Unpopularity, as any schoolchild knows, is a highly specific spiritual sickness which can strike almost anybody at any given moment. It is as irrefutably real as the measles, and in its own way almost as contagious. Once a person has been diagnosed with it there is nothing he can do except wait patiently for it to run its course. Attempts to deny it or overcome it by ingratiating oneself with the uncontaminated will only result in ever crueller forms of rejection.

My fall from grace came about almost casually. One afternoon in summer, during our annual Hans Beimler athletic and paramilitary contests, I saw a group of my classmates sitting together on the grass of one of the playing fields. I had just won my quarterfinal in the two-hundred-metre dash, qualifying me for the next round, and I was feeling buoyant enough to join the group without being invited. They had been laughing, but by the time I joined them they had fallen quiet.

‘Let’s try it on Stefan,’ somebody said. They had evidently been playing some game. I looked about cheerfully, always ready to offer myself as a source of entertainment.

A girl called Katje Boeden spoke. Katje was the daughter of a high-ranking official in Hermann Axen’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I had a private connection to her. A short time before my father’s debacle in New York, her family had made a friendly overture to mine, and we had visited them at their house in the Wandlitz compound outside the city. It was a warm home, full of games and toys, and decorated with tribal art from Zanzibar, which gave it an almost bohemian flavour. Katje had been wearing a smocked green dress. On her blossoming body it had seemed to gather up all the innocent wonder of childhood and draw it surreptitiously into a strange new context – that of imminent sexual awakening. The effect on me had been powerful. While Otto went off with her older brother Paul, she took me into the garden where she had a tree house in a half-dead beech tree. We sat talking for what seemed hours – about what, I have no recollection, but I was bewitched by her. Unfortunately, my father lost his job soon after, and our visit was neither returned nor repeated.

Over the next two or three years, Katje had grown extremely pretty – petite, with sharp, delicate features, sparkling blue eyes and fair hair which she wore in a tight, gleaming crown of braids. Though she never made any reference to our meeting at her home, she was always friendly towards me.

‘Name the first three animals to come into your head, Stefan,’ she said.

I forget the first two animals I named, but the third was the three-toed sloth. After a pause there was a titter of laughter: gentle enough at first. Conscious of being a good sport, I sat with my smile, waiting for an explanation. But as the merriment seemed about to subside, a peal of louder, more fulsome and somehow more ominous-sounding laughter broke from Katje. For several seconds it sounded out alone; clear and pure, like the clarion call announcing the arrival of a new force into the field. Then one by one the others joined in, and suddenly they were all doubled up with the kind of wild, hysterical, self-perpetuating laughter that teenagers everywhere so enjoy being overcome by. I continued smiling, telling myself there was nothing to be dismayed about, and yet feeling a faint ache in my throat, and sensing, distantly, the advent of something momentous and catastrophic.

‘The first animal is how you see yourself,’ a boy told me when the group had begun to calm down, ‘the second is how others see you. And the third is what you really are.’

‘A three-toed sloth,’ Katje shrieked, and once again they were shaking their sides and rolling on the grass, helpless with laughter.

A day or two later, during a geography class, where we were giving presentations on the tropical zone, a boy stood up and announced with a sly grin that he was going to talk about the three-toed sloth. I would say that my heart sank, except that ‘sank’ implies a depth of plummeting that wasn’t quite what I experienced. Rather, my heart slid down a little, then seemed to move more in a sideways direction, so that as I heard the boy inform us that a sloth stays so still that mould grows in its hair, that its maximum speed – that of a mother sloth hurrying to protect her child – is five metres per hour, that they aren’t hunted because even when shot dead they continue clinging to their branch, not dropping until they reach an advanced state of decomposition, and so on, while smiles danced about the room like little sunbeams, what I felt was not some ever-blackening descent into misery, but more a kind of anaesthetising removal, as if I were travelling out beyond the walls and windows towards some point of absolute detachment and indifference. I saw that I had fallen from favour, and I accepted this without protest – inward or outward. After all, I told myself, feeling my familiar sense of déjà vu, this had already happened. It had happened long ago: what had just occurred was no more than a case of fallible human judgement belatedly recognising the verdict handed down against me long ago by some impassive agency of reality itself.

The last athletic qualifying rounds were held on a sweltering, overcast afternoon. The acrid smell from the chimneys of the nearby foundries and breweries was particularly heavy in the air. I sat on a bench alone, waiting for the semifinals of the two hundred metres. Though I wasn’t what you would call an athlete, I had always been able to cover short distances at above-average speed. I relate this faculty directly to my ability to think up ingenious falsehoods at short notice. Both have to do with the instinct for evasion, which has always been more highly developed in me than that of confrontation. As I sat on the bench I fantasised about winning my round and then going on to win the final itself the following week. In my vision, my face remained stern as I crossed the finishing line, as though to convey that I scorned any hope that this victory might alter my status as an outcast. But as I left the field I would catch Katje’s eye, and although she would say nothing, the brief stalling of her attention would tell me that a secret connection had been opened up, linking her in her realm of light to me in my darkness.

In reality what happened was this: As soon as the starter pistol was fired and I leaped forward with my rivals, I became aware of something that at first presented itself as a kind of abstract sense of obstruction. Normally when I ran this race I would have the pleasurable sensation that it was somehow tailor-made for my own particular combination of skills, stamina and ambitions. But now I felt unexpectedly at sea. My body didn’t seem to know what to do. Instead of obediently turning itself into an instrument for the expression of speed, it seemed to want to express some new idea of doubt or faltering. I felt that I wasn’t so much running as flailing. After a moment I realised that among the shouts coming from the spectators lining the track were cries of unmistakably hostile intent. ‘Five metres per hour,’ I heard, ‘There’s mould growing on your fur,’ and ‘You’re decomposing, Vogel.’ It was these cries that were thickening the air about me. If ever I wanted proof of the communist idea of the individual as a social unit, even to his physiological functions, I had it here: the sense of my comrades actively willing me not to win the race was indeed slowing me down, their words dragging on my limbs like lead weights. I caught sight of Katje up ahead of me, thronged by her companions. As I drew level with her, I heard her cry out, her delicate-featured head tilted back in an attitude of ecstatic contempt, ‘Here comes the three-toed sloth.’ The space about me felt almost viscous, the sour-ochre smell of burnt malt and coal dust mingling and merging with the hatred radiating towards me, each somehow amplifying the other, until I felt suffocated and nauseous. As I moved slowly across the finishing line, several metres behind the slowest of my rivals, I found myself panting for air and strangely dizzy. Suddenly the ground swung up towards my face and I blacked out.

When I came round (I had fainted, apparently from heat exhaustion), I understood that my long quarantine was over. The worst had been confirmed and I was now officially unpopular.

From this time forth I was referred to as ‘Sloth’ or ‘Threetoed Sloth’, and I was considered fair game for all the ambient spite and aggression that gusted about the school to vent itself on. My life became highly unpredictable. For days on end I might be totally ignored. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a storm of the most violent hostility would erupt about me. I would find myself being shoved and kicked, my books being torn from me and thrown all over the place, my nickname being chanted with the peculiar gleeful derisiveness (like the ecstasy I had noted on Katje’s face) that appeared to be one of the distinguishing features of my persecution. After a few weeks, as though the virulence of my case weren’t sufficiently expressed by these manifestations, there was a further development. It took the form of a sign: an oval paw shape, with three clawlike protruberances. It appeared first on the toilet doors, then spread rapidly throughout the school, showing up on chalkboards, official notice boards, desktops, even the classroom walls themselves. At first I attempted to erase these sloth paws whenever I saw them, but for every one I removed, another dozen would appear, and I realised this was futile. Besides, there was a sense in which I regarded them as having emanated from myself, rather than my comrades. They were the proliferant, bitter fruit of a tree that had its roots in my own being. For not only was it I who had delivered into my comrades’ hands the fateful image of the sloth in the first place, but it was also my own compromised condition as a human being that had made them so ready to seize on it and use it as a weapon against me.

At that time of collective sexual burgeoning, it was clear to me that I had allowed something poisonous to enter into this most sensitive part of myself, and in doing so to canker it. I awoke from my wet dreams feeling more anxious than gratified, my head suffused with a sickly afterglow left behind by apparitions whose superficial femininity could never quite conceal some underlying nuance or redolence of Herr Brandt. In those unenlightened times, the obtrusion of such a figure into one’s erotic dream life was alarming, to say the least.

My daytime fantasies were similarly contaminated. At first these invariably featured Katje, with whom I continued to imagine, pathetically but ardently, situations in which a ‘secret connection’ would suddenly be revealed between us. In absolute silence we would withdraw from the outer world where she was obliged to keep up the appearance of my tormentor, into a private realm of sharply enhanced intimacy in which her true feelings for me spilled out in waves of intense, radiant warmth. There, we would hold hands, looking tenderly into each other’s eyes. I would kiss her lips, feel her small mouth yield beneath mine, and taste the sweetness of her tongue. Drawing back a moment, she would look at me almost pleadingly, as though begging my forgiveness for all the spitefulness she was obliged to heap on me in the outer world. Shyly she would remove her blouse, offering me her girlish breasts with their budlike nipples. As I kissed them, I would reach a pitch of arousal. And then suddenly Brandt would appear in my mind, a ponderously scoffing presence, his face wearing that old knowing sneer, as though to say, Who do you think you’re fooling? And with an inward slump, I would feel the burden of my contagion, my brokenness, reassert itself inside me, and my brief, celestial vision would dissolve.

Given its physical effects, it was not surprising that this burden should assume a physical form in my imagination. The image that would come into my mind was Brandt’s scar. I began to feel as though that snail trail of glistening scarlet tissue had migrated from him to me, and that although it might not be visible to the eye, its presence upon me was nevertheless clear as day. This was why people had begun to recoil from me, and it seemed to me entirely natural that they should do so. I remember that whenever I was attacked, whether verbally or physically, a part of me was always firmly on the side of my attackers. If it had been possible to divide myself in two, I would probably have joined them in their assaults on me.

I had already tasted the paralysing effects of this antagonism during my two-hundred-metre semifinal. What happened to me over the next few years, as my unpopularity ran its course, was essentially an enormously drawn-out version of precisely that experience.

A deep lethargy settled on my spirit. My mind grew dull and my body felt permanently torpid. I began to see the requirements of my life in terms of immeasurable distances that had to be crossed, but never could be, so infinitely slow had I become, so that it was better not to embark on them at all. At home I spent hours at a time horizontal on my bed. I would like to say that I became self-scrutinising and studious, that I read copiously, read ‘everything’, but in truth I spent most of the time staring at the ceiling. If I did develop any form of connoisseurship, it was a connoisseurship of vacancy. I retain from that period the sense of a mysterious relationship between rooms and time. At a certain depth of immobility one forgets the ostensible function of a room as a shelter or area boxed off for some specific activity, and begins to experience it in its purer nature, as a ship transporting one across the ocean of time. The more motionless I became, the more apparent was this function. At times it seemed to me I could almost feel the slight swell and surge of that invisible element beneath me, and this was a strangely pleasurable sensation – a feeling of naked contact with a mighty power intent on annihilating everything and fully capable of doing so. I told myself that I need only lie there and let myself be carried forward for every vexing thing that surrounded me to fall away and crumble into dust. That I myself would be a part of this slow-motion Armageddon was merely an added bonus.

My lethargy thus fed on itself, growing thicker and heavier, until I reached the point where even the simplest, most basic tasks, such as opening a window or closing a door, would have to assert their demands on me with an irresistible urgency, before I could stir myself to perform them.

During this period I formed the idea that every phenomenon that comes into being represents a victory in a struggle against a force willing it not to come into being. I pictured this opposing force as a kind of Chinese Dragon, a Dragon of Stability, jealously guarding the status quo. It patrolled the borders between occupied and unoccupied space, and it lay curled and scowling at the threshold of every possible action. In order to open a window one must first slay the dragon posted to ensure that the closed window remain for ever closed. The fire these dragons breathed took the form of waves of paralysing intertia, a breath of which was enough to overcome you unless you had extraordinary vitality as well as unshakeable belief in the importance of what you wanted to do. More and more I found myself defeated before I could even move. Was it worth the almighty struggle, the expenditure of limited energy, to open that window, when after all nothing material would be changed by doing so, and when, even if I succeeded, another dragon would immediately be posted to ensure that the now-open window would now remain for ever open? Increasingly, it seemed not.

In this way the dragons grew steadily bolder and more numerous, crowding into the most intimate corners of my existence, until I could almost see them, massed about me like iguanas I had seen in pictures of the rocks of the Galapagos Islands, fatly luxuriating in the near-perfect stultification they had finally procured.

The only thing that punctuated my inertia was an occasional bout of yearning. Yearning is the passive form of protest: instead of trying to change things by a concrete attack on what exists in the here and now, it puts its faith in what lies beyond. The objects that triggered this feeling varied, but they had in common a mixture of enchantment and a kind of shyness, an inclination to retreat or disappear from view.

I became susceptible to certain aspects of the natural world for the first time. Nature impinged very little on our life in Berlin, but that made the occasions when it did all the more piercing. A group of slender trees, greyish with a dim, pewter-like gleam and fine raised lines shoaling horizontally around the smooth skin of their trunks, rose from the rubble of a derelict public garden near our apartment. They were grouped closely, in a way that stressed their kinship and gave them the appearance of conversing with each other, in a language known only to themselves. That and the slight glimmering sheen of their barks gave them a mysterious glamour in my eyes. They seemed to be concealing a vivid, secret life of their own. I would stop and look at them, mesmerised by the vague suggestion they gave out, of a realm of existence contiguous with mine, yet utterly unlike it. I yearned to cross the threshold into this realm, to reconfigure myself within its matrix of sap, fibre and sunlight, and there were times, stilling myself to the utmost, when I felt on the point of doing so, whereupon, as though suddenly aware of being encroached on, the trees would abruptly withdraw into themselves, becoming mute, inert, wooden. Likewise with the sky. Mostly it was grey, but sometimes on winter afternoons, as the sun went down behind the great apartment blocks that marched to the farthest horizon in every direction, it would turn a clear amethyst colour, and things that were not noticeable before were briefly inscribed in fire: strange runes, hairpins, chunks of frozen drapery, cat’s paws of dispersing jet vapour; suggestive of the traffic of other empires, parallel with and utterly unlike our own; infinitely beguiling and absolutely elusive.

That which withholds itself came to form my definition of the desirable. Most of the girls at my school came into this category. Katje’s successor in my imagination was a Russian girl named Masha, the daughter of a visiting physicist. She had dark, glistening hair and a smooth, dark-complexioned face with narrow green eyes that turned delicately upwards at the outer corners, giving her a look at once feline and oriental. She was extremely reserved; probably just shy among her new companions, but I chose to attribute it to an innate sense of superiority over us benighted locals. Our German tongue in her Soviet mouth became strangely transformed, the vaunted exactnesses of its agglomerate noun phrases melting back from pure, harsh meaning to something almost music-like as she blithely softened every vowel and liquefied each consonant. On the rare occasions when she condescended to speak in class, I would listen to her with a feeling of anguished desire. Like the trees and the sunset-lit clouds, she gave the impression of being merely the outermost flourish of some immense, hidden universe, and her voice, making sounds that were simultaneously familiar and alien, seemed the point of entry. We never exchanged a word or even a look, but unknown to her she and I conducted a prolonged, passionate love affair. In the private theatre of my psyche, I took her on long walks through the city, glutting myself on the erotic melancholy of her presence, kissing her fervently in the drizzle under budding linden trees, taking her invisibly home to my bed and murmuring her name over and over until I had worked myself into a state of rapture. She disappeared from our midst as unexpectedly as she had arrived. But such was the perverse premium I now put on unattainability that the effect was merely to intensify our relationship, enshrining her in my imagination with the solid gold burnish of an icon from her native land.

And then finally there were the things my father had brought back from America – my Slinky, my diver’s watch, my skyscraper pens. Having neglected them for a while, I once again found myself gratefully appreciating these objects. I pored over them, feeling them dilate in my mind until the world they connoted – snatches of imagined music, imagined flavours and textures, intimations of freer, larger human types – was more vividly present to me than my own surroundings.

One of the advantages of living on our side of the Wall was our ability to believe that happiness did actually exist somewhere on earth, namely in the West. Happiness had a home. For most of my compatriots the name of that home was West Germany, and its furnishings were the products they saw advertised on the West German shows they tuned in to nightly on their TVs – the laundry soaps and detergents whose accompanying celestial and erotic imagery brought home so forcibly the terminal shittiness of our own Spree and Dega. But I seemed to have inherited my mother’s instinct for the deeper hierarchies – either that or my father’s aborted career had made more of an impact on me than I had realised: for me the name of that home was always America. In an obscure, private, but crucial sense, the trees I stared at were American trees, the clouds in the amethyst sky were American clouds, Masha was as American, despite her ostensible Russianness, as my father’s souvenirs. Although I wasn’t conscious of harbouring a wish to ‘go to America’, it strikes me that these acts of passive contemplation, of yearning, were perhaps not so different from the rituals of primitive hunters, who feel it necessary to take possession of their quarry in their imaginations before they can hope to do so in the flesh.