The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  I was about to open the file when I heard footsteps splashing along the corridor. They were coming closer. I switched off the torch and hurried to the door. Through the glass panel I caught sight of a burly man in overalls carrying a bucket and a mop. Muttering to himself, he set down the bucket and got to work. There was nothing I could do, no alternative way out. I was a prisoner among the filing cabinets until he was done.

  I slipped Richter’s file into my toolbox and crouched down in the darkness to wait. No sooner was I down on my haunches when I heard someone else outside, their approach marked by the familiar rubbery footfalls of institutional footwear. Again I peered out through the glass. Nurse Pitmann, alternately silhouetted and starkly lit, was making her way gingerly down the swampy corridor. I hoped she had come to check on the progress of the clean-up, but then I saw what she was carrying under her matronly arm: another stack of files.

  I was certain to be discovered. Frantically I tried to think of an excuse, an explanation for my presence in a room full of confidential records. Nothing sprang to mind. But then it was suddenly clear to me what I had to do. With an agility that surprises me even now, I raised myself towards the ceiling, planting my feet on the handles of the filing cabinets on either side of me. I reached up and with a single motion yanked the fuse out of the neon light fitting. All this must have made some noise, but I suppose the janitor’s mopping and splashing made even more. I jumped down again and scurried into the far corner just as the door opened.

  Nurse Pitmann threw the light switch. Nothing happened. She repeated the action twice more, with the same result.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she said under her breath.

  I heard her footsteps squeak and splash down the corridor.

  ‘The bulb in there’s gone again,’ she said. ‘We’ll need a new one right away.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ the janitor said.

  ‘No, it can’t.’

  The janitor squeezed out his mop and walked away towards the stairs. I got up and crept back to the door, just in time to see Nurse Pitmann disappear into the men’s lavatory. Whatever the reason for such an early return visit, it gave me my one chance to make a clean getaway. I didn’t need a second.

  45

  The journey back to Blasewitz was a journey across a city I no longer knew and where I did not belong. After my escape from the clinic, when finally the building disappeared from view round the corner of Angelikastrasse, I had experienced a moment of elation – relief, mixed with pleasure at my own decisiveness and guile – but that moment had been all too brief. By the time I was standing at the tram stop, standing in plain view of Stasi regional headquarters, its rows of blank windows like a blind man’s eyes, I was in the grip of different emotions. I had committed a criminal act. I was now a renegade, a saboteur. My actions were that of a man who had changed sides. But fear of detection was only part of it. I was afraid of what I was about to discover, afraid of the slender file concealed in my toolbox. That file would answer questions I had spent a year trying not to ask. (A year? Or was it much longer than that?) I climbed aboard a tram, stared through the cloudy windows at streets and skylines that were simultaneously familiar and strange, homely and hostile. I searched for reassurance in the faces of passengers and passers-by. Their expressions revealed nothing but a determination to keep their thoughts to themselves. And it came to me then, their very silence told me, that they all knew the answers to my questions. They had known them all along.

  I was sure police officers couldn’t be waiting for me at my apartment, not yet. Whatever detective powers had been brought to bear on the mystery of the unidentified plumber, they were unlikely to have produced results in under forty minutes. Even so, the sweat was trickling down my face as I turned the final corner. What if the file was snatched away from me before I had a chance to read it? I might be forced to spend the rest of my life in a state of suspense, able neither to begin a new life, nor return to my old one. Nor, I might add, did the prospect of imprisonment hold any kind of appeal.

  In the event I found the street empty. The schoolchildren were playing outside, filling the air with their innocent screams, but otherwise everything seemed normal. Slowly I climbed the stairs to my apartment – slowly, because I was still unprepared for the possible verdict of guilty that awaited me upon arrival. When at last I turned my key in the lock, a voice in my head told me to stop what I was doing before it was too late, to destroy the file instead of reading it. My old life could still be salvaged. Nothing had to change. The years of waiting might still be rewarded. It was like the voices in my dreams that said stay where you are; only this time I wasn’t going to listen. There was another voice now, Richter’s voice, my literary son and heir. I couldn’t bring myself to ignore it any longer.

  I gulped down a glass of water and went to sit down in my leather armchair. Less than a year had gone by since I first read Richter’s untitled manuscript – read it sitting in that same chair, opposite that same window with that same rooftop view – but recalling the occasion now was like recalling an event from adolescence. I couldn’t disown the individual who had sat in that chair, but neither could I be proud of him. The Bruno Krug I saw was the one Wolfgang Richter saw, and probably many others besides. I didn’t want to be in his company for longer than necessary.

  I turned away from the armchair and sat down instead at the dining table. I opened the toolbox. I took out the file. I allowed myself two deep breaths, then opened it.

  The file held just one sheet: a form, printed on thin white paper. At the top were the words: PATIENT ADMISSION (Emergencies). Underneath were sections for name, date of birth, identification number, time of admission, the name of the attending physician and other administrative details. These had all been filled in by hand. The blood group was stated as O. Finally I saw a number of tick boxes relating to medical conditions that, I assumed, might affect the range of possible treatment: allergy to penicillin, morphine and cortisone, haemophilia, asthma, hepatitis. All of these were blank, but for a smear of blue ink across the bottom of the page.

  I turned the form over. The back too was blank. Nothing more had been written, not so much as a line about the patient’s actual condition. Richter’s file was a non-file. It recorded his arrival at the clinic – at 4.14 a.m. on a Saturday in December – but nothing more, as if the clinic were a cemetery, a final resting place from which new arrivals were not expected to progress. I saw then that I had been naive. Richter’s death had been unusual and unexpected. There had been a risk of contagion, allegedly, perhaps of an epidemic. If that were true, the proper medical records were most likely under study at the Ministry of Health – either that, or they were still in the basement of the clinic, still in that same drawer, where I, in my haste, had failed to notice them.

  I stared at the form, at Dr Gatz’s handwriting (tidy but blot-prone on account of the inferior grade of paper), and something struck me as peculiar. Near the top left-hand corner was a paper clip, one easily large and robust enough to hold twenty sheets of paper. But it was holding only one. One sheet of paper does not need a paper clip. It is in no danger of becoming detached from itself. At one point there had to have been at least one other page, perhaps several. But they had been removed, the top sheet retained perhaps out of respect for bureaucratic tidiness.

  My stomach began a slow-motion capsize. I turned the form over again. In several places the ink from Dr Gatz’s fountain pen had seeped all the way through. Letters and traces of words appeared in mirror-image, slanting backwards. Here again, something wasn’t right. I flipped the paper over and back again, to make sure I wasn’t deceiving myself. But I was not mistaken: the mirror images of Dr Gatz’s writing outnumbered the originals. The explanation was instantly clear: ink from a second sheet of paper had leached into the one on top.

  Examination with a magnifying glass revealed that there had been several lines of writing. Full stops, commas and dotted ‘i’s came through clearly. But as far as the words were conc
erned, I could make out next to nothing. Only one fragment held out a promise of meaning, but no matter how long I stared at it, that meaning eluded me:

  Fr t r de li k Schlä nl p ns,

  I needed more light. I needed a reflection.

  I went into the bathroom and stood before the mirror, holding the form in one hand and the magnifying glass in the other. Somewhere in the building water was emptying from a sink, temporary airlocks popping and belching as the pressure slowly re-equalised in the system. As if approaching through a mist, the letters became words and the words a phrase:

  Fraktur des linken Schläfenlappens,

  which roughly translates into English as: Fracture to the left temporal lobe.

  The words pulsed before my eyes, black on white, white on black. Then my vision clouded over and I vomited into the sink.

  46

  This was not the easiest time. I prefer, if I am truthful, not to discuss it. In any case my recollection is unclear. I stayed a while in the bathroom. I’m not sure how long. At some point I wandered into the sitting room, the familiarity of which brought me the opposite of comfort (something like revulsion). Again, I cannot say why. I went to the window and looked out over the city, at the low rolling sky, at the ragged clouds, indistinguishable from smoke, at the children in the playground, obscured behind a veil of leafless trees. I must have stood for some time, because it was almost dark when I turned away and the children had gone. I cannot report on my thoughts. I am not sure if thought was what went through my head in any case. I saw pictures and heard voices, some from the past, others from a past that might have been (if I had done things differently, if only I had known), others from a future that was now lost and could never be recovered. Their effect was like – if it was like anything, if metaphorical treatment is what the occasion requires – it was like music, except that music has the power to soothe and purify; and these visions did neither. I did not eat. That much I can say. I had no appetite, and no pain either, of the physical sort. I was, I suppose, simply waiting: waiting for that state of being to pass, waiting to feel something – anything – other than what I did feel. Because sooner or later I would feel something else. It is in the prosaic nature of life that it continues to demand maintenance, attention to physical necessities, the endless rekindling of purpose. In the West this blessing, or this burden, is called simply ‘carrying on’. And, much like the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, there is very little hope of escaping it, this side of death.

  In my case what rescued me, the lifeline that I clung to, was anger: anger that burned with a righteous heat and grew with each passing hour. Such is the utility of outrages and atrocities for those who survive them: they simplify matters. Moral ambiguities, paralysing complexity, divided loyalties, all of them are swept away. My anger left me clear about what to do next, which was no less than what Richter had always wanted me to do (the Richter of my thoughts and dreams, and the occasional fleeting vision): I had to speak out. What had really become of Sonja and Thomas, the hopeful young lovers in The Orphans of Neustadt? What had become of us all, who had put our faith in that dream of a better world, a world of justice and common purpose? Richter had been waiting for me to answer that question all his life and half of mine.

  But I could do nothing where I was, there in the suffocating bosom of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. To speak out there would have been suicidal and impracticable, there being no means to disseminate my words. First I had to leave, to brave the death strip, to vault the inner German border, and the sooner the better. Every day of silence would be another day of falsehood, another drop of poison.

  Theresa was still in East Berlin. My first thought was to go to her and beg her to set the fugitive wheels in motion (phone calls and letters were out of the question). Her network had helped Manfred Dressler; they had agreed to help Wolfgang Richter. Surely they would help me. But Theresa had said she was done with the artist smuggling business and besides, if we talked it over beforehand the matter was sure to become entangled with the issue of our future together. She might think I was trying to force her hand, to crush her doubts beneath a weight of obligation: changing my life, leaving everything I knew, just for her. In short, I was afraid that to escape such an obligation she might decide to leave me once and for all.

  No, I would not go cap in hand to Theresa. I would approach the network myself, on my own behalf. I knew the name of her contact. His name was Anton. All I had to do was find him.

  47

  I went up to the college of music the very next day, in time for the start of morning classes. I didn’t see the young man in the bomber jacket, nor anyone else I recognised. The next day I returned, carrying a stack of books under my arm so as to appear professorial. I paced up and down the corridors, attracting occasional nods of recognition from pupils and staff, but with nothing to show for it. If Anton was a student it was possible he had graduated by this time and left. Nevertheless I decided to widen my search before giving up. I began to patrol a number of student haunts: a scruffy cellar bar on the corner of Pillnitzer Strasse, a hall of residence near the medical school in Johannstadt, a café on Seitenstrasse that Theresa had always liked, though it was a good twenty-minute walk from her apartment. On my second visit to the cellar bar – it was a dank and drizzling Friday night – I ran into Claudia Witt.

  She was sitting at a corner table with three friends, two female, one male, none of whom I knew. A celebration was under way, judging from the accumulation of glasses, bottles and cigarette ends on the table. Claudia’s hair was messier and more voluminous than at our last encounter, and she had acquired a pair of large looped earrings that visibly weighed on her lobes.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the orphan of Neustadt,’ she said when she saw me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The bar was crowded and noisy. I elbowed my way over.

  ‘Whose birthday is it?’ I asked.

  One of the females in the party pointed an unsteady finger at Claudia and shouted, ‘Guilty!’

  The party, it seemed, was well under way.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said and went to fetch a round of drinks.

  Upon my return Claudia grudgingly introduced me. Her female friends did not react to my name, but the young man seemed to know who I was. A plump individual with thinning hair and gold-rimmed spectacles – Johann or Johannes or Jürgen – he stared, then stumbled to his feet and offered me his chair. I declined it and pulled up my own.

  Not wishing to seem too eager, I asked Claudia a series of avuncular questions concerning her plans for the future. In tones heavy with forbearance she described how she was training to become a music teacher and filling in as a cleaner at the main city hospital.

  ‘But you’re still playing in the meantime? Keeping your hand in?’

  She said something about forming an ensemble with some other music graduates, who were likewise short of employment. I made encouraging noises and said I would certainly be in the audience whenever her plan bore fruit. After the conversation had meandered through a melancholy discussion of career opportunities generally, I leaned closer and asked Claudia if she could help me.

  ‘I wanted to look up a friend of Theresa’s, but I don’t know how to find him. His name’s Anton.’

  Claudia shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea who that is.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Unless you mean spotty Arnold. I wouldn’t call him a friend.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ one of the other girls asked.

  ‘Arnold Seybert. Campus secretary of the Free German Youth.’

  The girl wrinkled her nose. ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘Otherwise known as Arni Sebum.’

  ‘The name was definitely Anton,’ I said.

  At that, Johann or Johannes or Jürgen looked up at me and then, just as tellingly, looked away again.

  ‘I don’t know anyone called Anton,’ Claudia said. ‘What do you want him for?’

  Johann or Johannes or Jürgen had turned away fr
om us. He was stroking his chin and pretending to be interested in the street outside. He knew who Anton was, I felt sure. Maybe they all did.

  ‘I’ve got some photographs for him,’ I said. Not wanting to explain further, I got to my feet. ‘If something comes to you, Claudia, could you give me a call? I’d really appreciate it.’

  I told her my phone number twice, slowly and clearly.

  Claudia and her girlfriends looked at me as if I were crazy. By contrast, Johann or Johannes or Jürgen hardly looked at me at all. When I looked back over my shoulder, I saw his lips twitching, as if he were committing something to memory.

  A week went by and nothing happened. I continued my searching, but Anton was nowhere to be found. I grew impatient. The decision had been made. The path was now clear, but I was unable to take the first step. Had Anton really left? Was I looking for him in the wrong places? Or was he – the most troubling explanation – eluding me on purpose? According to Theresa, he had been reluctant to help Wolfgang Richter with his escape because he hadn’t trusted him. Maybe he didn’t trust me either. And why should he, given my ambiguous history? Perhaps the chances were too great that I was the bait in a trap, a covert servant of the secret police, acting under direction. If that was Anton’s thinking, I would have to find my own way across the death strip, because he was not going to help me, not even with Theresa pleading my case.

  Had I been weighed and found wanting? With each passing day it seemed more likely. I began to resent this Anton, whoever he was, for refusing to manifest himself in my presence, for forcing me to live in limbo, my heart and ambition in one place, my flesh and bones in another. I didn’t deserve to be shut out of the West, any more than I deserved to be shut in the East – and I was shut in. Every day the valley, which is to say my whole world, felt smaller and more confined. I swear that at times I found it physically difficult to draw breath. I paced the city perimeter in those darkening days, not for relaxation or inspiration, but like a caged animal hungry for the wild. I slept badly or not at all. Gruna Willy’s prophecy (for so it now seemed) was coming true. The death strip was all around me, slowly contracting like a barbed-wire noose.