Seven Lies

by James Lasdun

  Brandt was in the glass-walled office to the side of the main entrance, surveying the empty lobby with his usual dull stare. He wore a crumpled brown jacket over a sweat-soiled undershirt in which his womanly breasts and very large stomach bulged and sagged like pumpkins in a sack. Black stubble glinted on his whitish skin in the artificial light of the little booth, and the bulging roil of scar tissue between his throat and ear gleamed like satin. This scar, so he claimed, was from a grenade wound received during some battle on the Eastern Front. To my youthful and admittedly subjective eye, it was a decidedly unheroic-looking scar, and in fact had something furtive and guilty about it, like some malignant companion that had attached itself to this otherwise vague and uninteresting person. It was the scar – it seemed to me – that compiled reports on the comings and goings of the inhabitants of our building; the scar that had to be propitiated with bottles of Schaad-Neumann aquavit. Brandt himself gave the impression of living under its tyranny. For his own part he would have been content to pad around the place keeping the plants shiny, the floor waxed, supplying the tenants with cheap eggs from the poultry co-operative where he had a special concession. But some incomprehensible malignancy had settled upon him, and he was now its servant.

  Once, when I was quite young, I had seen him carrying a parcel to the door of an elderly couple who lived on our floor. The parcel, which evidently contained either a mirror or a framed picture, slipped from his hands and fell to the floor with a smash and tinkle of breaking glass. He stooped down at once to examine it, prodding the wrapping with his fingers, an expression of grave concern on his face. Then all of a sudden a most extraordinary cynical sneer took possession of his features. Fully aware of me looking at him, he dumped the parcel at the door of the elderly couple and padded off, shrugging as he passed me by, as if to say, Nobody will know it was me who broke it, and even if they suspect, there’s nothing they can do about it. Furthermore, he seemed to convey that my having witnessed it, far from alarming him, in fact implicated me in the deed itself, making me no better than him. And the strange thing was, I did feel mysteriously implicated, and guilty too. It was the first time I had seen an adult do something patently and knowingly ‘wrong’, and the idea that such a thing could be came as a profound shock. From then on, whenever I ran into Brandt on my own, he would give me a contemptuous, almost taunting look, as though to say that he and I knew each other too well to have to pretend to be respectable citizens.

  Otto told him we needed to get into the storeroom. He rose with a lugubrious sigh, evidently meaning to accompany us.

  ‘No need for you to come,’ Otto said suavely. ‘Just give us the key and we’ll let ourselves in. Here, this is for you. Compliments of the house.’

  Brandt hesitated, holding the bottle in his hand as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Then he winked unpleasantly – or rather it seemed that his scar winked – and unhooked the key from the ring at his belt.

  The storeroom occupied a large area of the basement and consisted of a series of open cubicles behind a single steel-mesh fence with a padlocked door in it. We opened this door with the key Brandt had given us, and by the dim light of a couple of naked bulbs found the cubicle that corresponded to our apartment, picking our way between the many glue traps Brandt had set out, in which insects and the occasional mouse lay in odd contorted positions, some of them still twitching with life.

  There in our cubicle, among bits and pieces of old furniture which we no longer used, lay my mother’s trunk: not so very large, but with ornate hasps of tarnished brass at every corner and great florid brass buckles that intimated a world of strange and remote ceremoniousness. I suppose I must have seen it before, but I had never taken much notice of it, and certainly never looked inside.

  A sweet, mildewy smell rose as we opened the heavy lid. It was neatly packed, everything stowed in small boxes or bundles. The linen was in one corner, in a rust-coloured cotton sack, itself monogrammed with the intertwined initials and three falcons of the von Riesen crest. My brother looked on impassively, apparently less intrigued than I by this faintly mouldy-smelling exhumation of our family’s past, while I poked around, turning up a set of silver spoons, an old marbled photograph album and a case of pocket-sized books beautifully bound in dark green leather.

  ‘Come on,’ Otto said, grabbing the pile of linen, ‘the mother’ll start fretting.’

  I looked at the case of books. Of all things, it was a set of poetry: World Poetry in Translation, Volumes I to VI. I didn’t know or for that matter care very much about literature, but I had an instinct for contraband, and the thought of anything – poetry included – that might not be officially approved of automatically excited my interest. I opened one of the books: poetry on one side, German prose translation on the other, but Otto was growing impatient.

  ‘Let’s split,’ he said, ‘it gives me the creeps down here.’

  Closing the trunk, we went back upstairs, Otto waiting for the elevator with the linen while I returned the key to Herr Brandt.

  Seeing me alone, the man immediately relaxed into that familiar contemptuous expression.

  ‘So did you find what you were looking for?’ he asked.

  I muttered that we did.

  ‘And what was that?’

  I looked at him, more surprised perhaps than I should have been by this flagrant reneging on his tacit contract to turn a blind eye: here after all was a man who had obviously broken every bond of decency with his fellow human beings. His face, or rather the swelling tissue at his neck, seemed to stare at me with a brazen leer as if to say, So what if I accepted a bribe to mind my own business? You know me better than that . . . However, it was apparently out of personal amusement, to remind me that we were both contemptible creatures, that he asked, rather than any real interest, for when I said, ‘Oh, just a few odds and ends,’ he merely gave a chuckle and let the matter drop.

  Upstairs, my mother and Kitty unpacked the linen. It had lain so long in the trunk that the folds seemed to have made permanent creases in the material, and the creases themselves had discoloured slightly, forming a grid-like pattern over everything we unfolded. But the silk-embroidered monograms were intact on every corner, shiny as the calm areas on ruffled water, and in spite of the poor state of the linen itself, my mother still seemed entirely satisfied with her idea.

  She and Kitty spent the next day washing the linen and wringing it through the mangle. The following morning, when my father returned from New York, he found them ironing it in the kitchen.

  It was evident that all was not well with him. Normally he was fastidious about his appearance, careful to keep his wavy black hair well combed, aspiring to a well-groomed anonymity in his dark suits, plain ties and clean white shirts. Even after his all-night flights back from New York he would look spruce and tidy, if a little tired. But this time there was a strange raggedness about him: his tie loose, his shirt dishevelled, his jacket crumpled as if he had used it for a pillow. Most unusually, he had not shaved at the airport. And there was a haggard look in his red-rimmed eyes as they roved around the pieces of linen draped all over the kitchen.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, turning up the corner of a tablecloth and examining the embroidered initials.

  My mother told him, ‘I thought it might come in useful when we go to New York.’

  ‘Put it away. Get rid of it.’

  It was extremely rare to hear him speak sharply to my mother. She retorted at once:

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Joseph? Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’

  ‘Kitty, leave us, would you?’

  Kitty slipped out of the kitchen. My father waited till he heard her close the door of her room.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he asked my mother.

  ‘Joseph, please don’t speak to me in that manner.’

  ‘As if your family isn’t enough of a liability already, you have to go flaunting your ridiculous heirlooms in front of strangers . . .’ He waggled the e
mbroidered corner at my mother. ‘Von Riesen . . . What do you think this is, the Hapsburg Empire? The court of King Ludwig? Are you crazy?’

  ‘I would hardly call Kitty a stranger.’

  ‘You have no idea who she talks to.’

  My mother’s eyes gleamed dangerously. She asked in a tone of deadly self-control:

  ‘Joseph, what is the matter? Did something happen in New York?’

  ‘No!’ he shouted. He seemed to quiver. And for a moment a look of fear crossed his tired, careworn face.

  For my mother was right. Something had happened in New York. It appeared my father had made a blunder. What he had done, I learned later, was to have slightly overestimated his own licence to make concessions in the finer detail of an informal round of arms negotiation; a minute conciliatory gesture that he had believed himself empowered to offer, but which had been relayed to a member of the Soviet SALT II negotiating team stationed in Geneva and promptly aroused that personage’s imperial ire. On the diplomatic stage at that particular moment in history, when the two sides of the globe had worked themselves into an inflammable sweat of paranoid terror about each other’s intentions, the smallest things were charged with an exaggerated significance. There was the well-known incident of the Soviet official who forgot to remove his hat when he greeted President Nixon in Moscow for the signing of the SALT I treaty. The negligence was interpreted by the Americans as a deliberate affront, and the newspapers spent many days speculating on what precise grievance was being symbolically expressed. Given that this year, the year of my father’s blunder, happened to be the very year in which our state was prevailed upon to change its constitution, and proclaim itself ‘for ever and irrevocably allied’ with the Soviet Union, my father had good reason to be worried. History doesn’t relate what happened to the official who forgot to take off his hat, but there is little reason to believe that he was forgiven for his error.

  At any rate, my father wasn’t. A few days after his return he was told that he had been removed from the UN team.

  My father must have guessed that that was to be his last trip; in addition to the usual case of miniatures for bribing Herr Brandt, he had brought with him presents of an especially poignant ‘Americanness’: a raccoon-skin hat for my mother, a New Mexican turquoise pin for Kitty, a calculator for Otto, and for me a set of metal ballpoint pens, each in the shape of a famous American skyscraper. These joined the other knick-knacks and gadgets he had brought home on earlier trips, and because they were now part of a finite series, never to be further augmented, they acquired a hallowed quality in our household. They were the sacred relics of a brief, visionary connection with a reality larger than our own; one that had tragically eluded our grasp.

  CHAPTER 2

  So much for my family’s glorious ascent into the international political elite of New York.

  To my mother’s credit, she never directly reproached my father, but the tragic aura she assumed from then on must have been a living reproach to him, and even if it wasn’t, he certainly subjected himself to enough reproach of his own. Quite a rapid change came over him: he continued to work hard (he was sent back to the Friendship Treaties, and the subsequent agreements on technology-sharing with other Warsaw Pact countries), but under what seemed a steadily thickening glaze of failure. He wasn’t the type to respond to criticism from his superiors with defiance or countercriticism. What he seemed to want were opportunities to show his loyalty and diligence, if not in order to be reinstated, then at least to be acknowledged as a faithful servant. At the same time, though, he had obviously lost his self-confidence, and with it the air of quiet capability that had once impressed people, so that even if his blunder had been forgiven, he was clearly no longer suitable for a high-level career in the diplomatic service. His appearance grew shabbier. He aged. There was something distracted and disconcertingly meek in the way he smiled.

  As for my mother’s ‘tragic aura’, it was a complex thing; a hybrid, I believe, of real disappointment, and a kind of tactical reorganisation of her forces. There was humility in it – just enough to deflect the Schadenfreude or downright vengeful delight of her acquaintances, and to convert what had formerly been a rather too flagrant haughtiness into something more subtle and sombre and dignified. If she could no longer intimidate people by the suggestion of hidden powers in her possession, she could make them respect her out of consideration for the magnitude of our loss. She made a point of telling our friends and neighbours what had happened, always in a tone of sad but unselfpitying acceptance of our misfortune, thereby establishing the event in terms that were acceptable to her, and gaining control over people’s reactions to it.

  It was at this time that the word ‘intellectual’ first entered her active vocabulary. Pretty soon it was joined by other, similar words, such as ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’. ‘So and so is an intellectual fraud,’ she might be heard saying, or ‘So and so has no aesthetic sense whatsoever.’

  At first these remarks had a tentative quality, like somebody trying out a new way of dressing and pretending not to be anxious about what others might think. But people seemed to accept them without protest, and the self-consciousness soon left her. Before long it was apparent that she had constructed a new hierarchy of values by which to organise the world in a manner that once again accorded with her invincible sense of our family’s worth. If we were not to take our place in the inner circle of the political elite, then so be it: we would dazzle and confound others from our eminence in the sphere of real merit, which was to say the sphere of culture and ideas and, above all, Art.

  Given that none of us had accomplished anything at all in this sphere, her successful transformation of our whole tone and image as a family must be counted as quite a triumph. Her own education had been a ramshackle affair, interrupted by the war (though she claimed to have had a tutor at the age of eleven who had made her read ‘everything’), but her brother Heinrich had been through university, and at one time contemplated a career as a man of letters. He still subscribed to the official literary publications, and in his position as senior counsel at the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police, he had easy access to the best artistic circles, which from time to time he still frequented. Naturally my mother enlisted him in her new project. And doting on her as he did (he had no family of his own), he was happy to oblige.

  A new phase of our life began. Uncle Heinrich introduced my mother to a number of officially recognised writers and artists of his acquaintance. We dutifully made the round of their plays, concerts and exhibitions, mingling with them afterwards, and before long they began appearing at our apartment on Micklenstrasse. Naturally obsequious as a breed, and knowing of my mother only that she was the sister of an important government functionary who took an interest in the arts, they were never difficult to entice. In a remarkably short space of time, through sheer force of will, as well as that curious hypnotic power of suggestion that gathered people like sheep into her private fantasies, she turned our household into a gravitational centre for artists and intellectuals of every stripe. My father acquiesced in his meek way. Once, timidly, he asked if she was sure she wasn’t going to ‘receive disadvantage’ for associating with the wrong types, but he was quickly silenced by her acid retort that she hardly thought her brother would be introducing her to charlatans of the kind he was obviously referring to.

  The apartment itself underwent a transformation. Framed prints and reproductions went up. In time, as my mother’s patronage grew, artists began presenting her with original oils and watercolours, and these joined the reproductions on the walls. There were even some sculptures which, like the paintings, were both representational and at the same time sufficiently unrealistic in their distortions and bulbous excrescences to indicate that their creators were fully abreast of the latest developments in modern art. Furthermore, they were uniformly of what I would call an ‘aspiring’ tone. Eyes and hands were often raised upwards in a slyly sublime manner. The darker, more turbul
ent works were sure to have gleams of light peeping over some horizon in the background.

  The most ‘aspiring’ of them all was a life-sized bronze statue representing a naked female dancer reaching towards the heavens. Her arms and hands were immensely thin and elongated, as if the intensity of her ‘aspiration’ had literally stretched her about five inches. Her thin legs were more like a flamingo’s than a human’s. Interestingly, though, as if distracted from his lofty purpose by a momentary lasciviousness, the artist had endowed her with full, upward-curving, gravity-defying breasts, which he had very carefully modelled to show the nipples and areolas in minute detail. Otto in particular was fascinated by these breasts, and when our parents were not about, he would entertain me by slinking up behind the girl and grabbing hold of them, murmuring delirious blandishments into her bronze ear. Kitty was embarrassed by her, and could be made to blush when circumstances forced her to acknowledge her presence. My father also objected to her, ostensibly on the grounds that she occupied more than her fair share of the living room. But my mother had pronounced this figure an ‘aesthetic triumph’, and we were given notice that anyone who criticised her ran the risk of being stigmatised as ‘visually blind’ – one of her most deadly put-downs at this time.

  It was during this period that I first heard myself being referred to as the family ‘poet-intellectual’. It was done so casually that I didn’t consciously notice it until it had insinuated its way into my own image of myself. I therefore didn’t react to it with the suspicion or perplexity I should have. As our artistic gatherings consolidated themselves into regular soirées and I heard my mother introduce me as our ‘literary man’, our own ‘poet-intellectual’, often adding, ‘He reads all the time. It’s impossible to drag him away from a book once he’s started; just like I was at his age,’ I felt it as one of those immemorial truths about oneself that are so well established they are almost too boring to mention. It was as if she had said, He’s rather small for his age, or He’s always had a sweet tooth. The fact that I had never written a poem, and that I never read a book unless I had to for class, was neither here nor there. The idea was like one of those cloud-forest plants that subsist on air and light alone. It appeared to require no nourishment from reality in order to grow, either in my own mind or in the minds of our acquaintances. Before long it became absorbed into the conversational ritual at our monthly soirées, where guests suffering from the slight awkwardness entailed in talking to the adolescent children of their hostess could now inquire after my poetry. ‘How’s the writing going?’ they might say with a look of respectful concern – or, more facetiously, with a little motion of their wrists, ‘Still scribbling away?’ – to which I would respond with a vague nod and what I hoped was a tantalisingly elusive smile, before changing the subject.