The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  ‘Bruno, are you all right?’

  It was the sudden stampede for Richter’s book, the tidal wave of affirmation and expectation building behind it, carrying it upward (financially) and outward (geographically) at unstoppable speed – that was what unsteadied me.

  My experience with The Orphans of Neustadt had been very different. After the publication of that pivotal volume, it had been nearly three years before Éditions du Seuil in Paris produced the first non-German edition. The book was translated into English a year later – badly and with several unauthorised cuts (a faithful edition, care of Faber & Faber, had to wait another four years). Other translations followed gradually, two or three each year for the rest of the decade and well into the next. Curious Koreans, Greeks and Indonesians were finally able to enjoy the work in their own language fourteen years after it was first published in mine. Perhaps this was because I had no agent in the West, the rights to the book being handled by Michael Schilling’s firm; but from where I stood, it was as if The Orphans of Neustadt was being passed by hand, reader by reader, around the globe – a process that seemed to me quite natural, a true reflection of how books have always been experienced and weighed (that is, slowly and with the occasional pause for reflection). By contrast, The Valley, like the latest teen craze, was spreading round the globe like news of the Second Coming. Was it really that good? Was it really that much better? Had Richter been alive, I would have been jealous. But this was not jealousy, not exactly. It had more in common with fear.

  ‘It’s all a bit unexpected,’ I managed to say.

  ‘You are pleased?’

  ‘Ecstatic.’

  ‘It is what you wanted?’

  A cool breeze blew off the river, carrying a hint of algae and burning tyres. Slowly my vision cleared.

  ‘Of course. I just hadn’t expected that kind of reaction. I pictured something a bit more discreet.’

  Theresa took my hand as we walked down the steps. At the bottom she leaned closer, the better to whisper in my ear, lover to lover. There were still those ‘distractions’ she had mentioned in her letter. I assumed they were carnal and hoped she was anxious to make up for lost time. But it turned out love was not on her mind.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve been very careful. Not even my mother knows the truth yet. As they say in the theatre, I’m really growing into the role.’

  It had been a worry to me that Theresa might find the burden of secrecy too much. I assumed that keeping secrets was something she wasn’t used to. Had I been more cynical, or more shrewd, I might have been less concerned. People share secrets mainly to demonstrate that they have them. Secrets imply inclusion, influence and status – but not in this case. For Theresa to reveal that she was not the author of The Valley would have had the opposite effect. It would have revealed that she was not as talented, interesting or noteworthy as she seemed.

  ‘What about your friends at the college?’ I asked. ‘You’re happy to keep them in the dark?’

  Theresa shrugged. ‘I’ll be done here before the book comes out. If anyone hears about it later, I’ll say I wanted to keep it under wraps, in case it didn’t amount to anything.’ Her cheeks were pink and flushed, no doubt in marked contrast to mine. ‘That makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Perfect sense.’

  ‘It’s what I’d do, if I actually wrote a book. I wouldn’t tell a soul until the deal was done.’

  I had exercised precisely the same caution when drafting The Orphans of Neustadt. I wrote it longhand in a series of notebooks bound in blue cardboard, working at night and whenever the chance came to be alone. When challenged, I claimed I was writing a journal of my dreams, which invariably had the effect of forestalling any further enquiries. Nobody knew what I was really up to. My motives for secrecy were complex. I was afraid of being mocked, yes. I was also concerned that my story might not meet with official approval; but more than these, I felt the fragility of the world I was creating. Like some rare fungus, it needed warmth and darkness to flourish and take shape. I had no thought of readers. If I addressed myself to anyone it was to my long-vanished mother, who I felt sure would take an interest in my imaginings, as being indicative of her son’s interior world.

  Those were my reasons. What were Theresa’s? I assumed it was modesty that lay behind her instincts. Theresa played the viola. She didn’t care for the limelight; she cared for music. It did not occur to me that to work in secret only because you dare not be seen to fail, that is not modesty. That is pride.

  28

  In the youngest northern summer there are portents of autumn. The fallen and trampled blossoms are forerunners of fallen and trampled leaves; clear summer skies usher in chilly summer nights; an unwavering sun bleaches colour from the land, anticipating the flat grey light of winter. But in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State this effect was accentuated by the hand of Man, by coal-fired production and the exigencies of the Five Year Plan. If autumn complemented the natural palette of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, summer did the opposite: it worked against the prevailing ambience. Its character and its colours, like a badly chosen dress, rather than flattering the wearer, only accentuated her flaws. Mists and miasmas, intrinsic to autumn, were revealed as factory emissions (even the taste was stronger when warmed up). Leaves that should have been green were mildew green, skies that should have been blue were battleship blue. And when a rainstorm washed away the smoke and sulphur, bringing brief, unfamiliar clarity, the effect was far from harmonious: under a pure blue sky the streets of the city looked like rows of rotten teeth. Summer was a bikini on an unshapely woman. Summer in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State left too little to the imagination.

  My summer was further compromised by the knowledge that Theresa would be done with the college of music before the season was over. What would happen after that was unclear. Creatively and financially we were now conjoined, thanks to The Valley. There was some satisfaction in that. But it was not enough. I wanted Theresa to come back to me, once and for all, and to stay – the way she had planned to stay for Wolfgang Richter, whom she now never spoke of, except in her sleep. Then I would know that she at least loved me as much.

  We met often, but never for long. I saw nothing ominous in this. Theresa had missed many classes and tutorials during her weeks away and, with final exams looming, she had no time for recreation. Our encounters were always hurried, even brisk. Eating and sleeping took up most of them; lovemaking took care of the brief intervals in between. The rest of the time I was alone, the days empty.

  In bed, though, I slowly began to notice other changes. The usual rites of seduction – rarely lengthy in our case – became abbreviated until they were little more than pre-coital semaphore. This, I am fairly certain, was not my doing. It was Theresa who was content to dispense with the preliminaries. I didn’t see this as a bad thing either. I assumed that her impatience was indicative of a deep and abiding attraction. This change coincided with a novel preference for making love with her back to me. When it came to seizing the moment – in the kitchen, the bathroom, the sitting room – this was both convenient and easy, little in the way of furniture being required. There was the added advantage (valued, I suspect, by many) that it left both participants free to pull whatever grotesque and simian faces their lust inspired without eliciting laughter or disgust. It was brazen, lewd and playful – desirable attributes in any sex life, even that of the most sanctified and upright couple. Only much later did it occur to me that there might be deeper and less desirable undercurrents at work in this new preference; that the distance between man and woman left both freer to fill their heads with whatever they pleased: different places, different circumstances, different partners. Only later did I come to think of it as the coitus of betrayal.

  ‘This position is ideologically unsound,’ I said one night, when we were in medias res. ‘Don’t you care at all about female emancipation?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

&n
bsp; ‘The male’s posture is essentially upright; the female’s submissive. This position reinforces patriarchal stereotypes. It’s reactionary. You should really be on top.’

  Theresa laughed. ‘You just want me to do the work. Where’s the emancipation in that?’

  ‘The right to labour is inalienable from the socialist ideal.’

  ‘You know, a lot of women give birth on all fours. It’s well known to relieve stress.’

  Not for the first time I was silenced by the thought of Theresa becoming pregnant. (Why do the English say falling pregnant, as if pregnancy were an illness, like influenza or shingles, properly eliciting sympathy? Is this a biblical reference to the fall of Adam? Is a pregnant woman a fallen woman to English sensibilities?) To me the notion of a Krug-Aden baby was wonderful and frightening, a window on a world of new priorities and new fears. Certainly it would have forced the issue where Theresa’s future domicile was concerned. But it would also have clouded that issue, because now there would be a third party to consider; a child whose interests would be paramount. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want Theresa to stay with me out of a sense of duty. I wanted the Krug-Aden offspring to be the natural outcome of our togetherness, not the cause of it. In any case, I assumed a child was a distant prospect. Theresa had once told me she’d taken the necessary precautions and I trusted her on that point without enquiring further. Perhaps this was rash, but like most men I preferred to keep the twin issues of female sexuality and female fertility as far apart as possible, with preferably a wall and a minefield in between them.

  ‘I should have told you before,’ Theresa said one morning, as she hurriedly got ready for another day of scraping and cramming. ‘Martin says I need a few lines about the next book.’

  Up until that moment I had been in bed, watching her dress, something that gave me an erotic pleasure that was all the more delicious for being subtle. I sat up. ‘The next book?’

  ‘Just a page. A couple of paragraphs. For Bernheim Media.’ She picked up her brush and began the daily assault on her tangled hair. ‘There will be a next book, won’t there, at some point?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I suppose.’

  ‘Have you got some ideas?’

  ‘Loads.’

  ‘Martin says it’s important they don’t get the idea I’m a one-trick pony – I mean, you’re a one-trick pony. Bernheim haven’t paid all that much. So they’ll be tempted to hold back on the marketing if they think there aren’t more books to come. He said building authors is expensive. They need to see a payback going forward. Do you see?’

  Once again, I didn’t see. I was still struggling with the concept of an author being built, visions of a robot assembly line alternating with flashes of Frankenstein’s monster.

  ‘Apparently it’s not unusual for people to write one book, even a very good book, and then pretty much dry up.’

  I smoothed out the sheet with the flat of my hand, trying to appear both surprised and indifferent. ‘Did Herr Klaus have anyone in mind?’

  ‘He mentioned some names. I didn’t know them. Of course, some of them soldier on, he said, but somehow they can never get back to where they started.’ Theresa gave up on the hairbrush and began buttoning up her blouse. ‘It must be dreadful. Imagine having all that technique and nothing at all to say. At least a musician never runs out of music.’

  She got up and slung her bag over her shoulder. Reflective detours were a rarity in our conversations these days. I missed them.

  ‘Anyway, the idea is to make it seem like The Valley is just the beginning. A début. Plenty more where that came from. Can you do that? It’s not like it’s a commitment. It just keeps your options open.’

  Theresa must have read some concern in my face. She sat down on the bed. ‘I’m sorry. It must be awful for you.’

  ‘Must it? Why?’

  ‘Everyone talking about your book as if it’s the work of a novice, as if you’ve started from scratch. You can change your mind, you know. It isn’t too late.’

  I looked into her eyes and it was clear what she wanted me to say. Hadn’t she told me she was really growing into the role? Hadn’t she told me she felt liberated? I smiled and patted her on the hand.

  ‘When’s my deadline?’

  29

  If Wolfgang Richter had wanted to poison my happiness, if losing Theresa had made him jealous from the grave, if the way I had disposed of his work had angered his spirit, if he had sought revenge for any other reason, he could not have come up with a more ingenious plan than this. If he had wanted to punish or deride me (as he had often done in life), if he had wanted to highlight the tragedy of his demise and the joke of my continuing survival, what could have served his purpose better than the impossible task Theresa had just dropped into my lap? It was disconcerting the way Richter’s book had been instantly taken up by the literary world. I feared unpredictable consequences, a raising of the stakes. But that was nothing. Now I had to follow it. I had to produce a new written work of my own, which – unlike The Orphans of Neustadt – would be explicitly and universally measured against The Valley. There was no escaping it: Richter’s masterpiece was now the only point of reference that counted.

  All comparisons are odious, but what could have been more odious than this? What could have revealed my creative eclipse more starkly? My inevitable failure didn’t need to be public. It was enough that Theresa would witness it: because, as far as the world was concerned, that failure would be hers – my gift to her, long since turned sour. For some time I had been troubled by thoughts of decline, by my inability to write anything from the heart, anything that felt honest. Now Theresa, by extension, would be haunted too. I had wanted, I suppose, to be more like Richter in her eyes; I had succeeded only in making the difference more stark and disenchanting than ever.

  The safest course in the short term was to do nothing and write nothing; to shrink into my shell, claiming a bad case of writer’s block. People respected writer’s block. In order to have writer’s block you had at least to be a writer. But how long before an episode of writer’s block evolved into something more embarrassing? How long before Theresa saw in my literary impotence a warning, a portent of the general impotence to come? Theresa had fallen in love with an artist. How could I bury that artist without burying her love alongside him?

  You will say I should have seen this coming. Every success brings with it a burden of expectation. The question of what would follow The Valley was bound to have come up sooner or later. For the publishers not to have made enquiries might have been construed as indifference. Why then had I not been prepared?

  Again, my own experience had been different. Enquiries about my second book had only surfaced well after The Orphans of Neustadt had been published. Nobody at the outset, not even Michael Schilling, had suggested I give up plumbing for a life in literature. We were both conscious less of what the enterprise promised than of what it threatened, namely censure and punishment. That had been enough to worry about.

  A second explanation: I hadn’t expected The Valley to be so warmly received, at least not by publishing professionals. It was far too easy for that. You could get through it in a handful of sittings; the sentences could be deciphered at the first attempt, and even its most reflective and analytical passages were hopelessly clear, inducing neither headaches nor dizziness nor rage. It was, in other words, the kind of literature I would have liked to write – which indeed I had written, once, a long time ago. Yes, The Orphans of Neustadt had been critically well received, but that had been due to its setting: a time and place that was both historically significant and fresh in the minds of millions. It was a book that spoke of (what turned out to be) a common experience. By contrast, Richter’s setting was a world nobody had experienced, a future setting that existed only in his imagination. I had thought it possible The Valley might prove popular eventually. I had not expected it to be instantly acclaimed by the guardians of the literary high ground, right around the globe.


  This was how I accounted for my blindness at the time. Looking back, I am not so sure I was blind. Perhaps a part of me – the part with no voice, the part that leaches into the consciousness via dreams – wanted me just where I was. I am speaking here of my conscience. Perhaps it wanted me comparing myself with Richter, day in and day out, judging my work against his. Perhaps it set me after Theresa too: so that I would be forced to measure her love for Richter against her love for me – its quality, its foundations, its strength. If so, I wonder if my conscience really had my best interests at heart; or whether what it really craved was a perverse form of martyrdom, an excoriating self-sacrifice in the wholly hopeless cause of truth.

  Weighed down with this unwelcome challenge, troubled as never before by Richter’s genius, I adopted my usual strategy: I walked. I walked all day and into the evenings, with pauses only for bread and beer, my path taking me (without the need for planning) in circles of varying diameter round the Altstadt. I went as far south as Mockritz, with its beleaguered little park, north to the wooded slopes of Hellerberge and the old streets of Pieschen. Occasionally I took a tram ride through the bleaker quarters of the city: Friedrichstadt, with its freight yards; Löbtau and Gorbitz, where the great housing projects had produced, together with certain material benefits, a landscape of arboreal deprivation reminiscent of the Russian steppe, only with less greenery and no horsemen. But in all these wanderings my mind remained fixed on the college of music. It was there that Theresa was hard at work, preparing for her future – a future in which I might or might not have a place. It was as if I were tied to her by an invisible force: no matter in what direction I set off, the college was always on my right or on my left. What I could not stand was to have it behind me. Resting at a tram stop in Plauen, I noticed a furry grey spider spinning a web in the uppermost corner of the shelter, moving in a precarious spiral round the centre of the structure. His motion was not unlike mine, but something about the sight disgusted me. I pulled down the web, sending the unfortunate arachnid clambering into a crevice for safety.