by James Lasdun
Fantastic freshness in the air up at the quarry. This autumn vigour that feels so like the energy of life, growth. Trees still a dusty, steely, end-of-summer green, but on a slope below me there was a single maple with half its leaf dome turned scarlet –splash! – like some trendsetter’s bold new fashion statement; this year’s embroidered shawl or silk pashmina.
I sat on a slab of bluestone in the rubble under the white birches. Burnt yellow plumes of goldenrod down by the old radio tower. Wild vines coiling all over its chain-link fence.
Inge, my Sleeping Beauty! Her spellbound air: deeper and deeper with every year that passes. Whose kiss will break the spell? Mine, if I can get this right . . . A farewell kiss.
Felt calm, looking out over the twilit valley, a bird singing its evening song from the cliff above me, birch trunks glowing like alabaster in the dusk. To disappear from this – like the swan in the poem stepping off from the solid ground of existence into the water; gliding there ‘infinitely silent and aware’. Or would one just sink like a stone?
No concept of hell in the Bible. I read that in a magazine some evangelist group left in our mailbox. No basis for those lurid medieval fantasies of eternal torment. ‘The wages of sin is death’; that’s all. The unrepentant sinner merely passes into nonbeing: which after all is what he wants, increasingly, while he’s alive; the prospect of new life being steadily more problematic and tiresome to him.
September 26
Another single tree turning – this one a delicate lemon yellow, a poplar down by the pond. Distant, intangible pathos. This other universe, with its own moods and meanings, its own not quite decipherable language for expressing them.
A word I learned recently: ‘catabolic’. Having to do with the breaking down of organic matter. I see myself as a catabolist: my peculiar identification with this season, my gravitation towards autumnal things: forms, sensations, experiences, shaped by their relationship with the extinction towards which they are travelling, rather than the act of creation from which they sprang. The implosive beauty of collapse.
‘I was purchased, my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of oranges . . .’
God! I can almost hear myself reading it aloud on one of those book programmes on NPR, though it would have to be some Hadean equivalent of that worthy institution, since the publication of such a document would of course be incompatible with my continued existence on this earth.
‘We are delighted to have the late Mr Vogel on our show tonight. Mr Vogel, would you be so kind as to read us the opening passage of your memoir?’
‘I’d be glad to: I was purchased, so my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of Seville oranges. My wife, something of a celebrity in those days, was more expensive . . .’
Do I dare?
To quote one of my own poems – ha! – Do I dare disturb the universe???
Do I?
But why this persistence in thinking I could possibly have anything left to lose? Just the sheer habit of being alive? Haven’t I always known I was going to have to break this habit some time? Well, that time has come! Splash! Inge, my darling, this is for you. I’d write it in German, but we fled that language, didn’t we? Now I think in English, even dream in it. Here goes. Sell it to the highest bidder . . .
CHAPTER 1
I was purchased, so my Uncle Heinrich informed me, for two truckloads of grade B Seville oranges. Inge was more expensive. She was something of a cause célèbre in Berlin – a well-known actress in those days, as well as a prominent agitator in the peace movement – and the authorities in the former East Germany, whatever else they might have been, were astute merchants. For her release they demanded hard currency: five thousand dollars’ worth of deutschmarks.
The money and oranges were given by the West German government to the Diaconical Work, a charitable trust of the Protestant Church, who in turn handed it over to the East German Agency of Commercial Co-ordination, Koko, where a friend of my Uncle Heinrich’s was deputy director.
Such was the procedure in what was then known as Freikauf: the selling of dissident flesh for goods or hard currency.
On the eighth of June 1986, an overcast day with dots of moisture sparkling in the warm grey air, Inge and I were escorted in an unmarked van to the Potsdam side of the Glienicker Bridge, which we then crossed on foot, Inge’s eyes full of tears, mine dry, each of us carrying two suitcases; without speaking, without pausing for breath and without looking back.
Two months later we were on a Lufthansa flight to JFK. The Muhlenberg Institute, an organisation of Lutheran pastors who had been in contact with Inge’s father (himself a pastor, who had fallen from favour with the official ‘Church in Socialism’ for his work helping to reunite families divided by the Wall), had sponsored our immigration, guaranteeing a loan to help us settle, and lending us a small apartment above a homeless shelter in the East Village, which we were to supervise in lieu of paying rent.
We had had no intention of settling in West Germany, or for that matter anywhere else in Europe. America was always our destination. Nowhere else would do. In my case this was a straightforward decision: for as long as I could remember, America had been the point of convergence for all the unfulfilled cravings of my parched soul, and the idea of getting out of the East had always been inseparably bound up in my imagination with that of finding some way of transplanting myself into the magically enriching soil of the New World.
So far as one can ever account for such things, I suppose this fixation must have had its origins in my father’s professional failure and the measures my mother then took to find other means of fulfilling her ambitions.
The chain of events began in 1974. My father, a lawyer by training, had been quietly consolidating a career in the diplomatic service of the German Democratic Republic, where his speciality was negotiating fine-print details in the Friendship Treaties springing up between the GDR and other countries in the Eastern Bloc. It was a humdrum if respectable occupation, but after the rest of the free world had followed West Germany in granting full diplomatic recognition to our republic in 1973, and the UN itself had opened its doors to us, my father was selected as a junior member on the GDR mission to that august body, and our lives looked set to change.
For a few months he shuttled back and forth between Berlin and New York: kindly, remote, befogged by jet lag and overwork, but always bearing gifts of a radiant strangeness – Slinkies, watches for deep-sea divers, a wireless that woke you with a cup of instant coffee. These little marvels formed the entire body and substance of my image of New York, and as I discovered many years later when Inge and I flew in, the picture they had created was strangely accurate: there below us were the toys and gadgets from that brief period in my family’s life; metamorphosed into an entire city of hooped and flowing steel, of vast, luminous, multi-dialled watches, of buildings like giant radios with towers of glass and streaming water.
My father’s visits grew steadily longer. There was talk of a permanent posting, even of our being sent out there to live with him . . .
New York! America! In those dark ages of absolute division between East and West, the very word ‘America’ seemed to bristle with dangerous, glittering energies. Like ‘Moscow’, it named the source of some ultimate fright and power. Bonn was our West German sibling: object of rivalry, contempt, occasional jealousy; but America and Russia were parental figures, and upon them we projected all our fantasies of supernatural and possibly cannibalistic strength. Nominally, of course, one was our friend, the other our enemy, but both gave us the same peculiar excitement to contemplate.
For my mother, the idea of our being sent to live in New York played directly into her sense of our family’s innate superiority. She and her brother – my Uncle Heinrich – were of blue-blooded Silesian descent. Naturally this was not something to brag about in communist East Germany, and they had been quick to drop the ‘von’ from the family name after the war. But in their quietly indomitable way, these two had m
aintained a sense of themselves as somehow ineffably superior to other people, and moreover they had managed to transmit this sense to those around them, not by any crude arrogance or self-aggrandisement, but by a certain aristocratic froideur; a mixture of haughty reserve and sudden graciousness, which bewildered people, intimidated them, and filled them with a kind of strained awe. My mother in particular was an expert in that particular form of psychological control which consists on the one hand in withholding, or at least delaying, a smile or word of kindness when the situation seems to call for one, and on the other in bestowing her approval of something – when she chose to do so – with a magisterial impersonality, as if she were merely the channel for an objective fact that had been handed down to her by some celestial source of judgement. The effect of the latter was to make one feel elevated, officially congratulated, as it were; as if a medal with the head of Lenin on it had been pinned to one’s chest.
You might imagine that in a socialist society a personality such as hers, with the distinctly unegalitarian idea of life that it projected, couldn’t possibly thrive. But somehow she managed to short-circuit the mental processes by which people might form a criticism of her in political terms, and confront them instead on a more intimate and primitive level of the psyche, where authority, if it succeeds in imposing itself as such, is unquestioningly believed in and – how shall I put it? – quaked before.
She was no beauty, with her sturdy little frame clad always in the drabbest brown and grey clothes, her crooked, slightly jagged-looking front teeth that dominated one’s initial impression of her face, and made even her oldest acquaintances prefer to shake hands with her than exchange kisses. But there was something forceful, even magnetic in her appearance. Her dark brown, slightly protruberant eyes, encased in folded, lashless lids, possessed an unusual mobility and expressiveness. As they narrowed attentively, tilted to admit a faint sardonic lightness, gathered into their corners the traces of a codified smile, flashed with anger or coldly averted themselves from your gaze, drawing behind them an almost visible portcullis, one felt – with the fascination of seeing anything naked – that one was observing the fluctuating movements of the very organism to which the names Frieda, Frau Vogel, Mother, all referred. For as long as I can remember, there was a patch of pure white in her greyish brown hair, such as you see in certain city pigeons, and this too seemed the mark or brand of some quality that set her apart, though I was always uncertain whether it represented something done to her, or something she was liable to do unto others.
All of this – the haughtiness of her manner, the crooked teeth, the naked, imposing eyes, the little arctic patch on her head – was contained in, and to some extent tempered by, an overall burnish of tragedy; a kind of final, stabilising layer that had been added to her portrait during the middle part of the 1970s. This was the tragedy of thwarted ambition, and my father was to blame for it.
In his profession hard work and competence landed you in Hungary or, God help you, Romania; above-average skills might get you as far as one of the West European Permanent Representations; a certain type of well-connected career lackey would end up in Moscow. But in the private hierarchies of my mother’s imagination, a mission into the Imperium Americanum was an acknowledgement to those entrusted with it that they were the very crème de la crème, the crack troops, the elite. As our posting there grew more certain, all the chilly potency of that vast opponent seemed, by virtue of our association with it, to decant itself into our lives, and for several weeks we emitted an eerie glow among our friends, like that of immortals from legend, imprisoned for a term among mankind, but now at last able to reveal their true lineage.
Naturally my mother pretended to make light of these developments, even to disparage them. At the mention of America, or New York, or the United Nations, her lips would purse with a look of involuntary annoyance, as if some ancient personal grievance were being referred to, after which she would rather affectedly change the subject. Nevertheless, she saw to it that people were told of our imminent elevation. Allusions to my father’s jet lag were dropped nonchalantly into conversations with our neighbours. Our friends in the Politburo, the Gretzes, were invited to dinner with Uncle Heinrich, who could be counted on to raise the subject with a twinkle of indiscretion, and thereby ensure that they were properly confounded. Heinrich himself, whom my father had helped get a job in the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, spread the word among our acquaintances in the security community.
Once, to my chagrin, my mother made an appearance at the school my brother and I attended, asking to be allowed to sit in on my history class. The subject was a comparative analysis of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and the abolition of slavery in the United States. The idea being instilled in us was that the Americans had had no ideological interest in freeing the slaves, and only happened to do so by accident, whereas the Russians, as their subsequent history showed . . . et cetera. My mother sat at the back of the classroom with a stern expression. Halfway through the class she stood up and called to me in a quiet voice:
‘Stefan, come with me, would you, please?’
Writhing inwardly, I rose and made my way towards her under the puzzled eyes of my teacher. We went to the office of the principal, whom my mother proceeded to harangue about the poor quality of the class.
‘I don’t see that the interests of our children are well served by quite such a crude portrayal of the Western powers,’ she declared. ‘I hardly think that those of us obliged to have direct contact with the capitalist system’ – placing a hand on my arm – ‘are likely to benefit from being taught about it in terms of caricature . . .’
I stood beside her; oppressed, heavy, numb; assuming the posture that now seems characteristic of my entire adolescence: hunched, eyes averted, blank-faced; a kind of permanent, petrified shrug.
The principal eyed us shrewdly from beneath her portraits of Marx and Engels. She must have been trying to decide whether my mother was raving mad, or was perhaps privy to some new educational policy development forming itself in the higher echelons of the party. Luckily for us she seemed to choose the latter. She promised to investigate the matter personally and see to it that the teacher in question was properly reprimanded. With a curt nod my mother thanked her and we departed.
The culminating act in her folie de grandeur (it amounted to that) came one evening while my father was away in New York. She, my brother Otto, myself and our ‘lodger’ Kitty (our maid in all but name) were seated at the dinner table, which, as usual, Kitty had covered with a cotton cloth before laying, when my mother suddenly exclaimed, ‘The linen! The von Riesen linen! We’ll take it to New York!’
It turned out that a trunk full of family belongings had survived not only the war but also the upheavals following Yalta that had left my mother and her brother orphaned and penniless in what became East Germany. The trunk was in my mother’s possession, stored in the basement of our apartment building. Among other things it contained a full set of Irish linen, including tablecloths and napkins, every piece embroidered with the von Riesen initials and family crest. Upon some fantastical new whim, my mother had taken it into her head that this linen, spread on a communist table in New York (I suppose in her imagination she saw herself as some sort of society hostess in the diplomatic world), would strike just the right note of mystery and coolly ironic humour, while at the same time impressing people tremendously.
‘Nobody will know what to make of us,’ she declared. ‘And we won’t explain. Just –’ and she gave a sort of aloof shrug as if indicating to some fascinated inquirer that she personally had never troubled her head to wonder about anything so trifling as a set of initials that happened, yes, since you ask, to coincide with those of her own maiden name. On these rare occasions, when the outward guard of her demeanour was let down to reveal the rather childlike cravings and fantasies it served to advance, there was something endearing about her. Our hearts went out to her then; we felt we were being ga
thered into some rich and vulnerable conspiracy, and our loyalties were aroused.
Otto and I were sent down to fetch the linen as soon as dinner was over. To do this we had to get Herr Brandt, the janitor, to let us into the storage room.
‘Try to keep Brandt from poking his nose into our things, would you?’ my mother asked. ‘Not that we have anything to be ashamed of. But he can be a nuisance. Here, take him one of the miniatures and ask for the keys to let yourselves in. Tell him you’ll give them back to him when you’re finished.’
It went without saying that Brandt was a police informer, and my mother was probably right in imagining he would think it his duty to make a report on something even so trifling as the retrieval of a set of initialled linen from a trunk. It was also known that he could make himself obliging over practically any matter in return for small gifts, preferably alcoholic. He was especially partial to the Schaad-Neumann brand of aquavit, impossible to get hold of in the GDR, and my father made a point of bringing back a set of miniatures whenever he went to the States, for the express purpose of lubricating Herr Brandt. Thirty or forty of them were lined up in a double row at the back of a shelf in our larder.
Taking one of these frosted, cylindrical bottles, Otto and I went down to Herr Brandt’s headquarters on the ground floor.
Ours was a modern building, constructed from the cheapest materials, but well maintained, and with a few grandiose trimmings, as befitted its inhabitants, who were mostly party officials of one kind or another. Four white pillars stood incongruously in the middle of the brick front, marking the entrance. The lobby was floored with polished slabs made of a pink and white agglomerate, like slices of vitrified mortadella. A bronze bust of Lenin, looking oddly piratical, stood on a plinth by the elevator, which generally worked. On every floor was a plastic indoor plant, the leaves of which Herr Brandt could be seen laboriously squirting and buffing on Sunday mornings. A powerful odour compounded of floor polish and boiled meat pervaded the stairwell, and there was a more or less constant sound of toilets flushing.
