The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  For all these hopeful signs, my openings never coalesced into a story. The snapshots never became a film. The characters were familiar to me, but I struggled to get inside their heads, to do the thinking for them. The reasons for this were clear: Alex, the reluctant warlord, Tilmann his nemesis, Tania his tragic bride, these were no longer my creations. Whatever their origins, they were Wolfgang Richter’s offspring now. They reflected his mind and his imagination – entities I had no desire to reanimate or dwell in. Richter himself had shown me no such consideration when he wrote The Valley of Unknowing, but that made no difference. Irrational it may have been, but I wanted to keep out of Richter’s domain the way sane men avoid Ouija boards, from an innate fear of trespass and a respect for the dead. It was to my detriment that I had no choice.

  Sequels are supposed to be easy. So much that is in them has been imagined already. The willing readers stand ready. The hard work of seducing them has been done. It should certainly be easier than starting from nothing. But it wasn’t for me. For weeks I slaved and drank, and paced and typed, my head filling up with plot lines and variations on plot lines, the mass of them growing and tangling like brambles in a wet summer, but without the promise of fruit. I went out only when at risk of starvation. I shaved rarely, sleeping only when exhaustion overcame me – at my desk, on the sofa, in the bath – my life resembling that of the archetypal artist more than it had ever done before. What I had to show for it was incipient diarrhoea and a mountain of screwed-up paper large enough to constitute a fire hazard. When Barbara Jaeger telephoned, inviting me to another of her soirées, I told her I thought I was dying and would be unable to attend. She gave me the name of a clinic in the suburb of Radeburg and told me to make an appointment, being sure to mention her name. In the meantime I was expected to attend her event.

  ‘People say you’ve stopped going out. I hope you’re not becoming a recluse, Bruno. That would be too boring.’

  ‘I’m working,’ I said, ‘for the first time in years.’

  ‘A Hero of the People can’t be a recluse. A recluse only thinks of himself.’

  ‘I’m not a Hero of the People, as you very well know.’

  ‘An anti-social socialist is a contradiction in terms. Eight o’clock sharp, and whatever you do, don’t bring anything.’

  I asked her what she meant.

  ‘That filthy moonshine you’re always handing out. The schnapps or whatever. It’s poisonous and much too powerful.’

  Which was pretty much how I felt about Barbara.

  That same night I dreamed of the Jaegers’ soirée, the way people often dream about unavoidable engagements in their near future. The dream occasion was unusual only in that it stayed in my mind longer than the real thing. It remains there still.

  At the beginning I was standing in a crowd, holding an empty glass. We were not in Barbara’s flat, but in a large civic building, where spherical lights hung down from the ceiling on long wires. Barbara stood by the door, wearing a red cocktail dress and greeting guests as they arrived, throwing back her head as she laughed, exposing her pale throat and the golden fillings in her teeth. Having no one to talk to, I went looking for a refill. As I gently elbowed my way across the room, I became aware of another sound: a relentless, irregular tapping. It was coming from beneath my feet.

  The other guests didn’t notice. They were all too busy laughing and smoking American cigarettes. Despairing of refreshment I went in search of cleaner air, making my way out into the voluminous lobby. Absently I brought a hand to my stomach and was horrified to discover I was still wearing my medal. I had been wearing it all evening without knowing it.

  I pulled off the medal and stuffed it my pocket, becoming aware once more of the tapping. It was louder, closer; an intermittent, mechanical sound, like Morse code. I followed the sound down a small flight of steps at the bottom of which stood a studded iron door. I looked for a handle, but there wasn’t one. I found only a large vertical slot where a keyhole might have been. I reached into my pockets for coins, but found only my medal. It turned out to be exactly the right fit. I yanked it free of its ribbon and pushed it in. With a gentle click the door unlocked.

  There was a long corridor in front of me, with more iron doors on either side, deeply recessed into the walls. There was a strong smell of earth, mingled inexplicably with a sickly aroma of cut flowers. The tapping sound was coming from the far end of the corridor. I knew what it was by this time: somebody was using a typewriter.

  The sound of typing led me to a door that was different from the others. I recognised the grain of the wood, the pattern of cracks and flaking varnish: it was the door to my apartment. I understood then, as if it were something obvious that I had merely forgotten, that the corridors beneath the civic building where honours were conferred led beneath the city to the villa in Loschwitz. I peered through the spyhole. I saw the interior of my apartment shrunk to the size of a pea. A light was on in the bedroom, a band of brightness falling across the hallway.

  I opened the door with my key. The smell of flowers was stronger on the other side. I tiptoed into the sitting room. My record player was on, the music gloomy and symphonic. I looked around for a weapon, some means of self-defence. What I found was a hammer, lying across the seat of my old leather armchair.

  As soon as I saw him, sitting at the desk with his back to me, wearing a black velvet jacket, I knew it was Richter I had been expecting all along. This was because we were not in my bedroom, or my apartment, but in his. A glance around the room confirmed this, even though many of the objects and furnishings were identical to mine. It seemed that I was the intruder in this place and Richter his victim. But what was to be the crime?

  I approached carefully. I wanted to turn and run, but I was on a mission and it was too late to turn back. Richter sensed my presence. He stopped typing and sat up, listening, his head turning just enough for me to make out the corner of his eyebrow, the waxy crescent of his cheekbone. The music covered the unsteady sibilance of my breathing and the pounding of my heart. Richter went back to typing, only the typing was different this time: much slower and regular, like the beat of a funeral march. It was, I realised, ironic typing, postmodern typing; typing that is aware of its own artificiality, its own intermediation – in short, typing that was aware of me.

  I dropped the hammer. It landed on the floor without making a sound. Richter continued to type, faster now, swiping the carriage return lever as the bell sang out the completion of each freshly completed line. How I missed that sound: that clattering, pinging affirmation of fertility and achievement. And how I envied Richter for making it, even though it had cost him his life on earth (we were clearly not on earth now, but in some other world, where machinery and devices were plentiful, but communication was not).

  By this time I was standing at his shoulder. I needed to know what he was writing. That was my purpose here. I had come as a spy, to discover Richter’s next project, Richter the true author of Survivors. Only here, from him, could I find what I needed to satisfy Theresa, to bring her back to the valley and to me. The only unnatural aspect of the mission was that Richter seemed content to collaborate in this second literary theft, to give me at least a glimpse of his intentions; as if I were there at his direction instead of my own. Perhaps, I thought, he had no use for celebrity any more. Perhaps the voice I offered him was better than no voice at all.

  I held my breath. My shoe leather creaked as I leaned over him. I could see the type, but my eyes refused to settle on it long enough to read it. They seemed to avoid contact the way one magnet repels another. Just a few sentences might be all I needed. One single line might reveal the nature of the book I was supposed to write. I forced myself to look again, to build the first line one letter at a time. And I saw this:

  One November morning, while the schoolchildren outside were going through their gas mask drill, the telephone rang.

  I knew what came next: the phone call from Michael Schilling, the Eiscafé rendezvous,
the handover of a manuscript – a manuscript without an author, without a title, awaiting my appraisal; a story set in the future, a future.

  The beginning of that story played out in my head and when the memory was over I found that my dream was over too. I was in bed, awake. Richter had disappeared, likewise the scent of dead flowers and the sound of typing. A blind was tapping against the window frame. Around me lay the familiar chaos of my literary false starts, a room full of mutilated and discarded papers, gently shifting in the draught. The sight reminding me with sudden force of petals thrown over a grave, the grave being, of course, my mother’s, since she had never had one, except for those I had provided for her in a thousand fearful imaginings.

  It was still dark outside, but I didn’t feel tired. I felt fragile and jumpy, like someone who has narrowly avoided a fatal collision. I climbed out of the bed and wrote down everything that had happened in my dream. By the time I had finished, I knew what it was the spectral Richter wanted me to write: not a sequel to his first novel, of course, but the story of that novel itself, its origins and its fate – which was, in part, my story, since I alone could tell it.

  What he wanted, in short, was a confessional work. Creatively speaking, it was the one book I could write; in all other respects it was the one book I couldn’t.

  A few days later a letter arrived via Theresa’s underground mail service, containing fifteen reviews of Survivors, cut from a variety of German newspapers and magazines. Hastily I skimmed through them, not out of concern with the general verdict (the book under examination was not mine, after all, but that of a man who was safely beyond critical range), but for fear of how the book would be interpreted. All the reviews were positive. Many were effusive. The longer reviews, in the more serious publications, detected weighty feministic themes and subtle intentions in the Aden début, upon which they expounded with miraculous confidence, as if they’d been eavesdropping on her mind. Thankfully none mentioned the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, or made any connection to its history. A couple pointed out in passing that the author had studied music ‘behind the iron curtain’. Nevertheless, for safety’s sake, I destroyed them, all except one, which appeared in a magazine hitherto unknown to me entitled Die Berliner Literaturkritik. The salient paragraph went like this:

  Perhaps Miss Aden’s greatest skill is in lending a timeless, universal significance to the smallest of human actions and the most private of human desires. It is not merely that we care about her characters and their fates. It is that in their struggles we sense the struggles of history, of whole societies and whole peoples. In this, and in the common themes of renewal, rebirth and betrayal, her work is strongly reminiscent of – perhaps even a subtle hommage to – The Orphans of Neustadt, the 1960s classic by the late Bruno Krug.

  My first reaction on seeing myself described in this way (as recently deceased) was one of indignation, tinged, I must admit, with a frisson of doubt. Foolish as it may seem, I did go into the bathroom and look in the mirror and splash water on my face, just to reassure myself. Only when fully satisfied that my existence was still corporeal did I examine the cutting again. This time, instead of indignation, what I felt was a haunting and inexplicable sorrow, as if at the passing of an old friend. The critic had made a factual error (how telling that the editors had failed to spot it). At the same time his manner of describing me was, as far as Bruno Krug the writer was concerned, nothing less than a statement of fact.

  38

  ‘Hello, Bruno? It’s me.’

  Theresa’s voice was faint and distant, masked by pings and rattles and a swelling ocean of hiss, as if she were calling from another world.

  ‘Hello, you.’

  ‘Darling.’

  Darling was a first from Theresa, a little touch of theatre.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Berlin. East Berlin. I just got in this afternoon. I’m using a neighbour’s phone, so I can’t . . . Is everything all right?’

  In my hand the receiver creaked. I was holding it so tightly I was in danger of rupturing the plastic. ‘Of course. Never better. I thought you were coming over last week.’

  ‘I meant to. Something came up. Martin said it was . . . I couldn’t really get out of it.’

  ‘When am I going to see you?’

  ‘Soon. I have to sort things out here first. I can’t just dump my suitcase with Professor Ebert and vanish – though I wish I could. I’m supposed to be studying here.’

  Even through the noise I could tell that she was nervous, troubled. But about what?

  ‘I was thinking I should come to you for a change? They have hotels in Berlin, after all.’ I attempted unsuccessfully to make the suggestion sound breezy, compounding my failure with a demented chuckle.

  ‘Another time, Bruno. I need to get dug in here first. I just need a week or so. Then I’ll come.’

  It was important, I felt, not to beg.

  ‘Are you getting time to practise?’ I asked.

  Theresa sighed. ‘I’m not sure there’s much point in practising any more. I’ve no performances coming up.’

  Down the line I heard a door close. Theresa was not alone. It made little difference either way. Theresa never told me anything sensitive over the telephone. She was convinced that the telephones in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State were all bugged, though I assured her the idea was ridiculous.

  ‘Did you see the reviews?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Very generous. Very perceptive.’

  ‘Weren’t they the best reviews you’ve ever seen?’

  ‘Generous to a fault, I’d say.’

  ‘There’s a whole lot more to come. That was just the first batch. Konrad’s promised to send them over.’

  I couldn’t help recalling that on Freizeit-Forum Theresa had maintained that she had not read the reviews of Survivors and had no plans to do so. It seemed that wasn’t true. Or was I mixing up Eva Aden with Theresa Aden? Was it only the notional writer who turned her back on the critics, while the actual musician hung on their every word? It was confusing, but I didn’t mind being confused, as long as it didn’t stop me seeing my golden girl again.

  ‘So what came up?’ I asked. Theresa didn’t answer. ‘What couldn’t you get out of?’

  ‘Just another bit of publicity.’

  ‘Another TV appearance?’

  ‘No, no. Just a page in Stern, this weekly magazine we have.’

  Even I had heard of Stern.

  ‘An interview?’

  ‘They called it a profile. There was a photographer and a journalist. It took for ever. But it could really help the sales, Martin says. It could really put Survivors on the map.’

  ‘I thought it was already on the map. I thought it was all round the world.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s just the literary world, Bruno: publishers and bookshops, intellectuals. Stern keeps you in the public eye, the general public. Mass media, that’s what really empties the warehouses, Martin says.’

  ‘When’s it coming out?’

  ‘Next weekend, I think. My mother’s bound to keep a copy. She’s already started a scrapbook.’

  Theresa laughed. Had she mentioned her mother to remind me of the price she was paying for our arrangement, a price that included making dupes of her family? How proud she must have made them, how dazzled and delighted (We knew she was musical, but this!): uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins, friends and acquaintances, old and new – all of it built on a lie.

  ‘So when . . . ? When can you . . . ?’

  ‘Soon. I promise. As soon as I can.’

  ‘All right. Fine. I’ll wait.’

  I heard her exhale. Was she laughing or sighing? I couldn’t tell.

  ‘So, Bruno, tell me: how’s your wonderful new book coming along?’

  ‘I’m having some second thoughts about it, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s nothing serious.’<
br />
  ‘I’m glad. I know what it means to you, your work. It’s funny, but I understand now, better than ever.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Another benefit of growing into the authorial role, I assumed.

  ‘You’d be lost without it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  ‘Your work tells you who you are.’

  39

  Before I fell in love with Theresa Aden my relationship with the wider world was, in a word, declamatory. I spoke, but I had no desire to listen and little need to do so. I was a transmitter, weak, distant and increasingly prone to interruption, but content to carry traffic in one direction only. The responses and opinions of my local readership, the fellow citizens who asked me to sign their battered copies of The Orphans of Neustadt, who expressed their admiration in gifts of home-grown vegetables and lardy patisserie, these were of some concern to me, and I was careful to participate in official masquerades of dialogue and constructive criticism when invited to do so. But when it came to readers in the non-socialist abroad, I was pleased to note the fact of their existence and (occasionally) their numbers, for reasons of vanity and financial advantage; but even if their comments had been audible, I doubt if I would have paid them much attention. I saw no benefit in subjecting myself to the judgement of strangers, let alone strangers in a foreign land. I was not a true participant in their cultural marketplace, where cash was king and the customer was always right. As I had often asked Theresa (rhetorically, of course) during the early, carefree days of our affair: how could an artist remain true to his own vision – in effect, honest – if he allowed his idea of beauty to be dictated by others? This indifference to Western opinion played well with my ideological overseers, who took it as indicative of loyalty. The truth is that I was afraid of what I might hear.

  With the publication of Survivors, with the miraculous birth of Eva Aden, I experienced a disturbing reorientation. The transmitter was finally silent. Now I wanted only to receive. The knowledge that things were being written and said about the woman I loved, that her image was being captured and pasted and reproduced all over the world, giving rise to all manner of lust and speculation, left me burning with curiosity. The fact that Theresa’s disclosure was evidently incomplete made my hunger all the greater. That is why, despite my dangerous proximity to the Richter affair, I began to take risks.