The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  In the interests of thoroughness I should record that I saw them once again, that sad old couple, in the grounds of the Tolkewitz Crematorium, where I occasionally strayed on my way across the river. Since the funeral a small stone plaque had been laid in the shadow of a yew tree bearing Wolfgang’s name, beneath which lay his ashes. It was an awkward encounter, a dank and windy day in late March. Herr Richter, I am sure, saw me from a distance. He took his wife by the shoulders and tried to steer her away so that we should not have to talk. But then she too saw me and could not be prevented from raising a hand in greeting. A stilted conversation followed, one which I found intensely uncomfortable, though the promised Eingabe was never mentioned (for fear, no doubt, of embarrassing me). As I was about to take my leave, Frau Richter took me by the arm and asked if I remembered ‘that girl’ Wolfgang had been seeing before he died.

  ‘Would you believe, she’s famous now? In the West. For writing books.’

  I expressed surprise, wondered if there could already be more than one book in the Aden canon.

  ‘Now I know what she was up to,’ Frau Richter added. ‘She was picking our Wolfgang’s brains.’

  I agreed with her that this was very possible, at which she began quite suddenly to cry.

  I didn’t go back to the crematorium after that.

  I got into the habit of drinking a good deal during those two years. If I avoided clinical alcoholism, it was not because alcoholism did not officially exist in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State; it was thanks to my weakened stomach, which had the habit of becoming irritated when pickled. All the same, I worked on the latest instalment of the Factory Gate Fables in a haze of misanthropic inebriation. Under this new influence the fable turned slowly and irresistibly into a farce. I broke with tradition and relocated the action to a collective farm. A bookish newcomer from the city attempts to seduce a sturdy peasant girl with another man’s love poetry passed off as his own. At a certain point in the action chickens escape on to the roof. (I wanted people to be reminded of Two on a Bicycle. In a small, sly way I thought it might help to keep the memory of my protégé alive.) In the end the peasant girl makes a fool of her pseudo-poetical suitor, leaving him penniless and suicidal.

  Michael Schilling, with unusual directness, told me the story lacked warmth. None of the characters was likeable: the lover arrogant and dishonest, the object of his attentions shallow and grasping. More importantly, it showed the agricultural proletariat in such a bad light that it was unlikely to secure ministerial approval. I had better redraft it, he said, introducing a little more in the way of working-class solidarity, if I didn’t want ‘questions asked’. I laughed when he said this. My whole life, it seemed to me, had been lived out in the shadow of questions; how could a few more make any difference? But since martyrdom was, it seemed, unavailable to me (and pointless in the circumstances), I did as he suggested to the best of my abilities, leaving him to improve on the laboured language and the tortuous tangles of grammar.

  Schilling was, of course, the only person who knew of my abortive plan to go West. I had told him long since that I had simply changed my mind, partly in the light of his advice – an explanation he accepted readily and without a hint of criticism. Since then he had never raised the subject again, as if, like his failed marriage, it was something painful, best left alone for both our sakes. I was grateful for his perspicacity.

  By chance, the day I finally finished the second draft of my new fable – which is to say the day I could no longer stand to have it in my apartment – turned out to be one of historical significance. I had decided to deliver the manuscript to Schilling’s office in person, not because I was terrified of losing it, but because I was out of liquor and needed to make a trip to the Intershop in any case. My priority being the alcohol, I went to the shop first and it was not until late in the afternoon that I reached Ferdinandsplatz. I hadn’t gone far when I realised that the number of pedestrians passing through the square was greater than usual. Stranger still, they all seemed to be heading in the same direction: when I looked back I saw only their faces; when I looked ahead I saw only the backs of their heads.

  Whatever the attraction, it wasn’t located in Ferdinandsplatz. The straggling columns converged on the south-west corner of the square and disappeared down a narrow side street. Curious, infected by the novelty of the spectacle, I followed. Soon I stood at the heart of a monumental modern zone: a showcase of Corbusian tower blocks and concrete plazas. People were spilling into the area from every direction. On Prager Strasse I saw a crowd of thousands gathered outside an international restaurant (hard currency only), but they weren’t after a table. They were just standing around. From further up the street came the sound of singing. I couldn’t make out the tune, though it reminded me of a hymn. I continued walking, almost bumping into a young man with, of all things, an altar candle. He was struggling with a cigarette lighter. ‘Here, hold this, will you?’ he said.

  Without thinking, I took the candle, tucking the manuscript under my left arm. The young man lit the wick, cupping his fingers round the flame. It was only then I noticed that most of the crowd were young, like him. In the fading light I searched in vain for grey hair, high foreheads, lined skin, the haggard badges of middle age – feeling suddenly out of place, as if I’d stepped uninvited into a student party. I returned the candle to its owner.

  Then the crowd was moving; shuffling forward at first, then picking up the pace, buoyed along by its own momentum. A petite woman in a white ski jacket put her arm through mine, so that my shopping bag of vodka bottles clunked against my thigh as we walked. Everywhere people were linking up, making human chains, adding reinforcement to the mass of flesh and bone, as if anticipating resistance. A banner was unfurled behind me. It read:

  ALLE MACHT IN EINER HAND

  GEHT BERGAB MIT UNSERM LAND

  As slogans went, this was quite poetic: the rhyming, the meter, the use of opposites. All power in one hand, (means) going downhill with our land would be an ungainly literal translation. Only after I had finished being impressed by the form did I ingest the content. In whose hands was power in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State? In the Party’s, of course. The Party enjoyed the leading role, by constitutional right – which could only mean one thing: I was participating not in a procession but in a protest. I had never seen a protest before, let alone taken part in one. Under Actually Existing Socialism the right to peaceful protest did not exist. The thrill of sheer novelty and the female arm clamped round mine were all that kept me from taking to my heels right away.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I had to shout. Around us people were chanting.

  ‘To the Hauptbahnhof,’ the woman said. I remember clearly her avian delicacy – the pale skin and dark eyes, the slight build. One good blow with a nightstick would have been enough to break her in two.

  ‘Why the Hauptbahnhof?’

  ‘The freedom trains,’ she said. ‘From Prague. Didn’t you hear?’

  What I hadn’t heard was that thousands of my fellow citizens had crossed the border into the socialist republic of Czechoslovakia, a journey for which no visa was required, and there set up camp in the grounds of the West German embassy. After negotiations between the three relevant governments, they were now being railroaded to the West so as not to spoil the upcoming season of revolutionary anniversaries. The trains, it had been agreed, would pass through the territory of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State on their way, not out of geographical necessity, but so that their passengers could be officially expelled, rather than simply being allowed to escape. A high price had been paid for this political fig leaf: protests and violence had erupted at stations all along the way, where hundreds more of my fellow citizens had tried to break into the carriages.

  This I learned later. That evening I was clear about only one thing: that we were collectively asking for trouble. In the early history of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State there had been instances of unrest, or so I had heard. They ha
d always ended in bloodshed.

  ‘What about the police?’ I asked.

  ‘They can’t arrest us all.’

  I wondered if that was true. How many people could they arrest? A hundred? A thousand? Where would they put us all?

  ‘What about the Russians?’

  ‘Just let them try!’ the bird woman said, throwing back her head.

  I hoped they didn’t try. The Russians, I was fairly certain, could roll over anyone or anything if they put their minds to it. Numbers were no impediment. But it wasn’t a vision of tanks or machine guns or tear gas that was responsible for my slipping away. Nor was it my burden of vodka and double-spaced fiction, though my arms were beginning to ache from carrying them. It was not an emotion or a feeling of any kind, but rather the absence of a feeling: an absence of belonging. I admired this youthful, defiant crowd. I was astonished by their bravery. I hoped the bird woman was right, that she and the other marchers would get everything they wanted without getting their skulls crushed. But as we walked on together, away from the Altstadt, away from the ruins and the part-ruins and the reconstructed grandeur of a fallen kingdom, towards the central railway station – now a metaphorical gateway to a freshly minted future – I found it impossible to share in that dream. You see, I had already been to that station, to the metaphorical reality as well as the physical one, and it had not delivered on its promises. It had not gifted me a new life. It had only made a wreck of the old one. I found, even on that extraordinary night, that I had no stomach for another disappointment.

  A couple of blocks from the station I broke away from the crowd. It rolled on without me, brave and hopeful, buoyed along by candlelight and song. From the shadows I watched it go by, still full of wonder and not a little envy; and that was when I knew what it was that divided us more than anything. For the people on that march the war – the firestorms, the rapes, the endless, numbing vistas of ruin – was just a story. It had no hold over them. They could leave it and forget it, just as easily as they could forget the fallen masonry of the Frauenkirche. Their appetite was for experience, their own experience: raw, direct and unpredictable. Stories, for this new generation, were for bedtime; things to be bought and sold and tossed away once they had been consumed.

  And this was unfortunate, because stories, which had been my refuge and my anchor for so long, were all I could ever hope to offer them.

  A few weeks later Herr Andrich and Herr Zoch failed to turn up for our regular meeting. This had never happened before in all the years of our acquaintance. I sat waiting in my apartment for most of the afternoon, periodically checking and rechecking the date and time (it was possible I had lost track, one day being much like another). Finally, at around six o’clock, by which time it was dark, the telephone rang. It was Herr Andrich.

  ‘Are you coming over?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Herr Zoch, then?’

  ‘No. We can’t. We’re needed here. We’re all needed here.’

  He sounded grim and slightly out of breath. He didn’t explain what he meant by ‘here’, or, for that matter, ‘we all’ and I preferred not to ask.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you, comrade, that whatever happens we’ll do whatever we can to protect you.’

  Herr Andrich did not normally call me comrade and I was suspicious of this sudden familiarity. In any case why should I need protecting and from whom?

  In the background I heard voices, the pounding of footsteps. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We may not speak again. For your sake we must never speak again until . . . until this is all over.’

  ‘Until what’s all over?’

  There was a heavy clunk on the line, but we were still connected. I became aware of a new sound: like a badly tuned radio, like interference. It took me a moment to realise that the source was organic, human.

  ‘They’re here.’ It was Herr Andrich again. ‘They’re at the gates. There’s no one to . . . I don’t know how long it’ll hold them.’

  I understood now where he was: at the regional headquarters of the state security apparatus on Bautznerstrasse. I could picture the scene outside, the crowds, the banners, the multitude of faces – perhaps the very same young faces I had seen on Prager Strasse: the boy with the candle, the bird woman in the white ski jacket.

  ‘Herr Andrich,’ I said, in spite of myself. ‘Whatever happens, don’t let anyone shoot.’

  I don’t know if he heard me. There was a lot of shouting going on.

  ‘I must get back to the files. Goodbye, comrade,’ he said and hung up.

  That was the last I ever heard from him.

  As history relates, the bird woman’s optimism turned out to be well founded. There were beatings and arrests during that first night’s demonstration and others that followed, but the Russians stayed in their barracks. Without the guarantee of fraternal heavy armour the governing apparatus of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State found itself unable to govern. In a matter of weeks it vanished into memory, just as surely as if sixteen million people had simultaneously woken from a dream. For many employees of the state security apparatus their final act was to burn and shred as many records as possible before their premises were stormed (an epic task, given that the totality of the files, laid side by side, would have stretched for seventy miles). It was this that must have occupied Herr Andrich and Herr Zoch in their final operational hours.

  According to press reports there was some method in this hasty bonfire of hearsay and history. The priority was to protect the identities of foreign agents and, on the domestic front, of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter – that is, citizens who provided confidential information to the authorities on a regular basis – citizens like me.

  58

  In December, following a visit to the site by the West German Chancellor, an appeal went out from the parish of Weisser Hirsch for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche. Money poured in from all over Germany and from all over the world, but I was long gone before the first new stone was laid. The great baroque dome, images of which sprouted up everywhere on hoardings, in magazines and in tourist brochures, was alien to me, part of a reassembled past that pre-dated my arrival and my adult life. Perhaps, as many said, it was part of our heritage and therefore part of mine; but heritage, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I was a child of those ruins. They spoke to me. In their eloquent desolation they consoled me. Now they were being swept away with unashamed haste, making me an orphan all over again.

  I had other reasons for leaving. The new government of all Germany had decided that the personal files of the state security apparatus would be made available to the public. Anyone who turned out to have a file could apply to view it and to learn what investigations had been conducted into their lives. Such information would include the identities of all relevant informers. It was also decreed, with some hesitation, that the files shredded in the final days of the ancien régime should be unshredded. The task of sticking them back together was given to forty-five civil servants, stationed in the Bavarian town of Zirndorf. Even at a rate of one hundred thousand pages a year, it was calculated that their work would take ten times longer to complete than the entire forty-year lifespan of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. Still, the fact remained that with every passing year, with every new application, the chances of my being revealed as an Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter grew. Such unmaskings happened every day, in a more or less public way, the revelations creating a feeding frenzy in the press. There were dismissals, divorces and suicides. Explanations were demanded, but rarely if ever listened to. The authors of the system got off lightly. The lower ranks were left to fend for themselves. This, at least, was my impression in those early months, when hope and fear went hand in hand.

  I migrated across Europe in stages, my freshly converted Ostmarks being supplemented by a healthy trickle coming in from The Orphans of Neustadt. This proved more valuable than I had supposed, thanks to the incom
petence of the old Ministry of Culture. An agency I turned to in London discovered unclaimed and unpaid royalties in a dozen territories, some going back more than a decade. These eased my passage westwards. I stayed a while in Amsterdam, until I was tracked down by an aggressive young reporter. In France, which was my home for two and a half years, I was treated successfully for a peptic ulcer, my stomach problems turning out to be neither metaphorical nor psychosomatic in origin. England was too hectic for my taste and there seemed to be journalists everywhere. I was in London when the newspapers learned that Christa Wolf, our most famous female novelist, had been an informer for the state security apparatus. In the space of a week four different reporters approached me, asking for my opinion on the matter. I declined to give it and was forever afterwards described as ‘elusive’.

  So I went west again, to Ireland, a place of bad weather and good books; and, having got there, maintained my intermittent line of march until I had reached the Atlantic Ocean. There, in west Cork, before the great grey horizon, among the low, sturdy houses and the drystone walls, I stopped. Except for one return trip to the valley, which honour demanded, I have yet to retrace my steps. In Ireland I have been left to live privately and in peace; and no has ever found me here, until now.

  One place I did not visit on my long migration was Munich. I stayed away from Bernheim Media. I made no attempt to establish Wolfgang Richter as the true author of Survivors. For one thing, I had no way of proving such a claim. My only supporting witness would have been Michael Schilling and he had expressed no great interest in setting the record straight. He was struggling to find work by then and had no time for the finer points of cultural record. Perhaps his attitude would have been different had Survivors become recognised as a permanent addition to the German literary canon. But it hadn’t. The book chalked up excellent sales for a couple of years, but with no sign of a sequel, or a successor novel of any kind, it was slowly superseded by works of a less pessimistic hue. Thereafter it was generally referred to as a popular hit; rarely, if ever, as a classic. This rendered any intervention on my part academic. Even if Bernheim had believed me, what commercial incentive would there have been to produce a new edition?