The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  I clinked my glass against hers. ‘To Wolfgang. And us.’

  We drank, draining our glasses in one. As soon as we put them down again, as soon as I looked into her face, I knew that the next significant thing to pass between us would be a kiss.

  14

  She had a tiny bedsit apartment in a modern block, one street away from the college. It was sparse and bare like a hospital, but Theresa had done her best to make it homely. There were vases filled with dried flowers and a large ethnic blanket pinned up across the wall. A degree of intimacy was achieved by careful arrangement of two anglepoise lamps, one of which was trained on the space above the bed; so that from anywhere else in the room our bodies would have been seen in tasteful silhouette. We bustled into the room, laughing, my arm by now round Theresa’s waist. If I am honest, I think she was a little drunk. I also think she was lonely. But neither of those considerations restrained me. I was puzzled and disturbed by the hold she had over me, by my own emotional incontinence.

  I wanted her body and soul, but body first. I am speaking here chronologically. I saw no reason to put off carnal ecstasy until after our spirits had fused into some perfect ectoplasmic whole. I was already at an age when putting off anything was a bad idea. But that doesn’t mean to say that the conventional accompaniments to sex – romance, companionship, shared recreation – were not also creeping on to my Theresian agenda. I had pictured them all, mentally trying them on for size. But elsewhere in my psyche was the understanding that they would never materialise, or only fleetingly. Theresa was young and beautiful. I had nothing to offer her that she would want to keep, nothing real. You can only go so far on a reputation. But if I was not, in the end, to have Theresa’s love, I thought, then the fact that I had once enjoyed her body might make the disappointment that much easier to bear.

  I had bought a half-bottle of schnapps on the way there. The room was cold. Still in our coats, we sat side by side on the bed and drank the liquor out of coffee mugs, while a single-bar electric fire slowly warmed us from the feet up. Theresa switched on a tape recorder. The music was Bach: chorale preludes arranged for solo piano – hardly the conventional music of romance, let alone seduction. But it seemed to have an effect on her. She put her head on my shoulder, humming the melody, allowing me to inhale the sweet, stirring scent of her hair. I imagined that during those first intoxicating (and intoxicated) minutes J. S. Bach and the musician playing J. S. Bach and the author of The Orphans of Neustadt were fusing in Theresa’s mind into a single creative entity: one mind, one spirit and one body – the body, as luck would have it, being mine. Still, didn’t that mean it was Bruno Krug the artist to whom she was drawn, rather than Bruno Krug the man, the former being an intangible entity, a dream lover of infinite potency and immaculate breath?

  By now any microscopic fauna still resident in my mouth were pickled, but still I wasn’t confident that brushing with salt had done enough to sterilise the internal environment. The salt had been Michael Schilling’s suggestion and he was anything but the Don Juan of the valley. I excused myself and went into the bathroom. Two toothbrushes stood in the tooth mug, but there was no sign of any toothpaste. Hastily I searched under the basin. Behind numerous bottles of shampoo and moisturiser and a roll of cotton wool, I found a wash bag. Inside, still in its cardboard box, was a fresh tube of something called Crest.

  Running a tap to cover my act of larceny, I squeezed out an inch of Crest on to a toothbrush – except that it was not toothpaste as I knew it. Stripes, long, red and perfectly parallel, ran right through it. Seen end-on, they formed a Maltese cross, which impressed me greatly. I tasted it with my tongue. It was toothpaste. But what were the red stripes for? Were they supposed to improve the look of my gums? (Were red gums desirable, and not, as I had always assumed, a harbinger of gingivitis?) How was it possible to keep all these stripes in place as the paste was squeezed from the tube? Why didn’t everything get mixed up, emerging as a smeary pink mess? And it occurred to me, even as I brushed, that the provision of innovative toiletries in maintaining a docile population must be even more important than I’d thought. For why else would a civilisation devote so much of its scientific and technical resources to meeting such a challenge?

  I hurried out again. Theresa was lying down, one arm behind her head. I went and sat down on the bed. ‘I expect you’re tired,’ I said.

  That was when she reached up for me and our lovemaking began.

  For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex). All literature is serious literature, meaning literature with a clear social purpose. Although declining birth rates are a perennial problem in socialist countries, depictions of human coupling are not regarded as useful to the greater social project and are therefore discouraged. In Western literature, by contrast, the issue is beset with difficulty. In commercial fiction sex occurs in a story because sex is what the readers are thought to want. But in less mercenary forms of fiction, unless the story has no sexual dimension, the author is torn. Sex for the purposes of titillation is definitely out. But to leave the reader at the bedroom door can seem coy or old-fashioned. If sex is important to a character, the experience of sex should be conveyed as convincingly as possible. Sex is another lens through which the inner workings of a character may be revealed, which usually means (this being serious fiction) that the sex is awkward, troublesome and miserable. There is a great deal of silence and occasional weeping. Still, for my money this is preferable to the meltings and feelings of rightness that wash over characters in the grip of romanticised fiction, where sex can never be what it is; where metaphor and simile must work overtime to turn flesh into spirit and the human into the divine.

  My memories of that first night with Theresa are, in any case, sketchy. Even those I have could not be called reliable. I am not being coy, or old-fashioned. But so much of what was good from that time was subsequently locked away, if only because to relive it would be to miss it more. I do remember that it was still chilly in the room, and that much of our lovemaking happened under sheets and blankets. At one point I wrapped them round myself like a Roman emperor, which made Theresa laugh. I remember the first sight of her naked: her skin paler, her breasts smaller, her lower ribs and pelvis more prominent than I’d expected. At one point I rolled her over and kissed her slowly from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, pausing to massage the muscles between her shoulder blades.

  As for the rest, I can reveal little in the way of objective truth. On other occasions, with other women, I had been in the habit of mentally replaying the carnal high points over the days that followed, retrospectively gloating on my sexual triumph. With Theresa it was different. Impressions of our night together – even things I couldn’t recall noticing at the time – flashed before my eyes uninvited, and often: the gossamer-fine hair on the nape of her neck, the way she bit her lower lip at the approach of pleasure, the last deep sigh before she fell asleep. Such memories came to me at unguarded moments and I couldn’t keep them out. This had happened with no other woman, with no other lover, and the experience was disquieting, because I didn’t know what it meant.

  I do remember the way Theresa felt as she lay asleep in my arms. The impression I remember clearly, as if it were yesterday: she felt vulnerable, like a lost child. And I wondered if she hadn’t come here, to my smoky valley, not for any of the reasons she had given me; to save money or to please her socialistic father, but to escape from something in the West, something that could no longer be borne – something or someone. She had come for the same reason I had come: for shelter.

  The bed was too narrow for sleep, but she fell asleep anyway. The recital and the alcohol and the sex had exhausted her. It was almost midnight. I decided it would be best to go. The morning to come would be awkward, hungover and malodorous – an unwelcome and premature antidote to romance. But I would leave behind a note, a charming and romantic note, one that she woul
d press for ever between the leaves of a favourite book.

  I got dressed and went over to the work table by the window, searching for pen and paper. There, to my surprise, I found a copy of The Orphans of Neustadt. It was a recent edition with a simple cover design: a skyline in silhouette, behind it a red sky split in two by the white beam of a searchlight. Theresa had told me she had taken my book from a library, but this was not a library book. The pages were clean and unread. It seemed she had bought herself a copy to keep.

  I was about to put it back when I noticed something protruding from under the back flap of the jacket. It was a strip of black-and-white passport photographs inside a small greaseproof-paper envelope. I took the photographs out and found myself looking at three identical images of Wolfgang Richter. He was smiling.

  15

  I set off home on foot, along the wide empty avenues of Striesen (which even by day all looked the same: low-rise apartment blocks, grass, spindly trees). It wasn’t too late for a tram or a taxi, but my mind was always clearer when my feet were in motion, and I needed clarity to rebalance myself and take stock. I didn’t care that it was drizzling.

  After my success with Theresa, I felt entitled to a period of calm. The long weeks of waiting and hoping, with the concomitant dangers of rejection and humiliation, were at last behind me. I had achieved my objective. The affirmation I’d craved was mine and it could not be taken back. If there was ever a moment to bathe in the afterglow, to breathe easy, it was now. In any event, I could not go on living as I had lived during the preceding two months: lurching from hope to disappointment and back again, working not at all, sleeping badly, wasting countless hours in draughty recital halls, hoping for a glimpse of my prize. As an interval, as a chance to re-experience the tunnel vision of the lovelorn youth, it was excusable, if not exactly edifying. As a way of life it was out of the question. From now on my dealings with Theresa would take place in a spirit of emotional and psychological equality, or not at all. Never again would there be quite so much at stake.

  As for Wolfgang Richter, his memory would now bother me far less than it had. It was undeniable that his interest in Theresa had sharpened my desire for her. The thought of them as lovers had tormented me before his death and troubled me after it. But now I was her lover too. Romantically, sexually, the young screenwriter and I had arrived at an honourable draw, at which point the matter could be laid to rest. In the haven of my old life I would be safe again, with nothing to fear from either the living or the dead.

  All this I told myself, even as the first memories – of words, of caresses, of flesh and hair, of scent and beauty and Theresa’s smile – gatecrashed my thoughts, reminding me of what I had tasted but not yet won.

  Could I make all of it mine, make Theresa mine, not for a night or a month of nights, but for ever? Hypothetically speaking, was such a thing possible? I decided it was. Obstacles remained, without doubt, but what love story was without them? Wasn’t love tempered in the fire of adversity (in life just as in books and films)? Theresa might grow to love me, in spite of everything. She struck me as capable of loving – as made for it, in fact. She might go on loving me, even when she knew my secrets and my flaws. Maybe I, and I alone, could give her what she needed. How else had we come this far? Wasn’t I more to her already than the author of a famous book?

  Buoyed by this optimistic mantra, I found my pace picking up. Crossing the empty roads, it was hard not to break into a run. It wasn’t until I was standing at the corner of the Neumarkt, the ruins of the Frauenkirche before me, that I realised I had been walking in completely the wrong direction.

  In my note I told Theresa that I was going to be in town the following afternoon and that I would come by her apartment building on the off chance that she was free for an hour or so. It was a carefully balanced proposal: neither needy nor indifferent, solicitous but not presumptuous. Its one disadvantage was it left me in suspense for the rest of the day, not knowing if Theresa would be in when I called or not.

  The only way to deal with this unpleasant interval of uncertainty, I decided, was to stay in bed, preferably asleep, for as long as possible. But my plan came to nothing. First, it was the morning the children came round collecting old newspapers for recycling. Next Michael Schilling telephoned. He was suddenly very anxious that I should return ‘that manuscript’ to him as soon as possible (the way he carefully avoided mentioning Richter’s name struck me as comical). Finally, around nine o’clock, I was woken by a booming voice coming from the stairwell: the unmistakable voice of the swimming pool committee in the person of Frau Wiegmann. She was having a conversation with one of my elderly neighbours and did not sound in a good mood. I could guess why: weeks had gone by since our last meeting and so far I had not managed to come up with a single bag of cement, let alone machinery to mix it. She was, without a doubt, on her way to remind me of my obligations and of how the whole project was hanging by a thread.

  I contemplated pretending to be out, but at the third peal of knocking I lost my nerve and sloped reluctantly to the door. ‘Excuse me, Frau Wiegmann,’ I said, trying to sound ill. ‘I think I’m coming down with something. I think it’s best you don’t come in.’

  Frau Wiegmann’s face was a vision of motherly concern. She bustled into my kitchen and insisted on making me a cup of malt coffee, which she produced from her enormous handbag, along with a large slab of gingerbread, which I suspect had been left over from Christmas. I played the role of the invalid for all it was worth, hoping to lessen the scolding I knew I was in for.

  Once installed in my best armchair, Frau Wiegmann went back to her handbag again and produced a piece of paper. ‘I received this just yesterday,’ she said, putting on her glasses, ‘from a Herr Farber, assistant general supervisor of the construction department of the Fritz-Hecker Saxony Kombinat.’

  I coughed as pathetically as I could, but Frau Wiegmann was not going to be put off any longer. ‘It says: due to a temporary oversupply of construction materials and adjustments to our current planning objectives, we shall be able to offer you, at no charge, one thousand kilograms of cement suitable for the commendable restoration works you propose; additionally the use of cement-mixing equipment for the likely duration of said works.’

  Frau Wiegmann took off her glasses and beamed at me. I had never seen her look so happy.

  ‘Herr Krug,’ she said. ‘How can we ever thank you?’

  I held up my hands. ‘It’s wonderful news, Frau Wiegmann, wonderful news. But I can assure you it has nothing to do with me.’

  Frau Wiegmann put her head on one side and gave me another indulgent look. It was obvious that she interpreted my words as modesty and that nothing I could say, now or in the future, would make her believe them.

  16

  Later that day I made a second attempt to buy toothpaste. It was no more successful than the first. The only item I managed to procure was an antiseptic gargle that tasted powerfully of burnt rubber and stripped the lining clean off my tongue. It was on my way back from the pharmacy that I had a disturbing encounter with an old derelict who habitually wandered the eastern districts of our city.

  In the Western world Gruna Willy, as he was known locally, would have been classified as ‘long-term unemployed’. But not in the East. In the East no such designation existed, for the simple reason that unemployment, like prostitution, had been abolished by Party fiat and could no longer be said to exist. All citizens under Actually Existing Socialism were workers, regardless of whether they actually had work. In any case, Gruna Willy was not without employment. He was fully employed in poisoning himself, a task that demanded long hours and exemplary dedication. (Years later, after the Workers’ and Peasants’ State had ceased to exist, Willy took additional steps to fend off the West’s undesirable nomenclature, which by that time applied to a fifth of the Saxon workforce. To the occupation of drinking he added that of urination – not the simple function, performed out of biological necessity, but public, premeditated and t
argeted urination. From somewhere he had acquired a bronze bust of Lenin, which he placed at a busy intersection south of the city centre. There, protected on every side by streams of traffic, he pissed at regular intervals on Comrade Ulyanov’s bald head, grinning gleefully and shaking his Johnson for all it was worth. Proof that this amounted to self-employment was supplied by passing drivers, many of whom acknowledged Gruna Willy’s performance by hurling their change at him. Whether the coins landed at his feet or struck him in the face, Willy’s entrepreneurial response was always to bow low before scooping them up in his cap.)

  Like many in his line of business, Gruna Willy had a number of proprietary catchphrases, which he used to distinguish himself from the competition. The most unnerving, which he would bellow at passers-by as evening fell, was ‘Watch out for the death strip!’ This was a reference to the mine-sown no-man’s-land that ran along our side of the inner German border, an undesirable stretch of real estate where the border guards (the Grenzer) were empowered to shoot more or less on sight. It was whispered – with what authority I cannot say – that Gruna Willy had been one of the Grenzer himself, and that he had shot someone on a night patrol, the guilt driving him into the arms of alcohol and madness. I even heard it said that his victim had been a young woman and that the young woman had been carrying an unborn child. These were fictional embellishments, I had no doubt, but they made Gruna Willy an object of dread and fascination, a spectre whose comings and goings were watched from behind the net curtains by young and old alike.

  Blasewitz was not on Willy’s regular mendicant circuit, but now and again he would show up like a bad conscience, reminding the local populace of his cautionary message and soliciting for funds. I had given him money on occasions, at other times food. Not only did I pity him; it struck me that the tenor of his message was essentially public-spirited. And there was something of the Old Testament prophet about his wild grey hair and deep oracular voice. Once I gave him a volume of my Factory Gate Fables (I had on that day’s wanderings spotted it lying in a skip), an act of charity to which he responded with one of his deep, theatrical bows. This, I expect, is how he came to know my name.