by James Lasdun
While I was happily working away, the door opened and Kitty came quietly into the room. Needless to say, she was after more information about her beloved Jürgen. What exactly did he say? What was his tone of voice? What had he been wearing? I sensed that she wanted the truth to match the romantic quality of her own feelings for the man. Since I was the sole source of this ‘truth’, I had it in my power either to bestow or to withhold what she wanted. It was unusual for me to find myself in a position of power over another human being. I was aware of it not so much in the Brandt sense of something to gloat over and exploit, as of a kind of transformative agent: a means of introducing a sudden and extreme volatility into a hitherto static situation. ‘Well, his exact words were just, “Ask Kitty to come down and see me,”’ I told her, ‘but the way he said them was as though seeing you was the most important thing to him in the world.’ I remembered she had knitted a red scarf for him, and I added that he was wearing that. A look of ardent longing came into her eyes. Gratitude also. She was perhaps twenty-six, not well educated, but in her quiet way fuelled by a passionate vitality that made her presence in a room always a positive enhancement. I knew that Otto had reassessed her lately from the point of view of his emerging sexuality, and found her to be desirable. As she looked at me, her eyes brightening with everything I said, I felt a kind of vicarious desire – as if I were Otto – and a corresponding rise in the value of the power I was wielding. Had I actually been Otto, I could surely have turned this situation to my advantage. Not least because Kitty, unsophisticated soul that she was, seemed at some level to be confusing me – the conveyor of pleasurable tidings – with Jürgen himself. For a moment the room seemed to brim with potentialities, as the two of us populated it with emblems of ourselves, each other, Otto and Jürgen, all conversing with one another. I felt that I was being given a foretaste of the world of adult passions, and a strong excitement came into me.
Footsteps approached. Kitty abruptly left the room. I heard my mother say ‘Hello, Kitty,’ in a bemused tone. She then appeared in my doorway.
‘What are you and Kitty up to? You seem to be whispering like a pair of conspirators whenever I see you.’
She was smiling with her mouth open. She had two smiles: a close-mouthed smile for formal occasions, and an open-mouthed, vulnerably toothy smile for when she was being a mother on intimate terms with her children. I sensed, however, something duplicitous in her choice of smile now, as though she felt guilty about her compulsion to pry, or at any rate was trying to disguise it as innocent curiosity.
‘What were you talking about?’
‘Oh, nothing serious,’ I said, racking my brains for something to tell her when she questioned me more forcefully, as I knew she would.
‘Please tell me what you were talking about.’
‘Kitty wants to knit something special for your birthday,’ I managed to lie. ‘She was asking me what I thought you would like.’
This silenced her for a moment. Seizing the advantage, I told her that Kitty had wanted the gift to be a surprise, and that now we had spoiled that. My mother looked uncomfortable, distressed even, and for a moment I felt an almost overwhelming urge to confess to all the absurd, trivial, but increasingly exhausting deceits her encouragement of my poetry had engendered.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘we won’t say a word to Kitty, and I’ll act completely surprised on my birthday. Tell her to make me a matching hat, scarf and gloves. Blue, with white falcons on.’
And so that subsidiary chain reaction of unpleasantnesses finally petered out. Except that Kitty had to spend all her free time over the next few weeks knitting woollens for my mother.
MEANWHILE, the main sequence continued. The month passed, and preparations began for the next soirée. Eggs were hard-boiled and sprinkled with paprika. Chunks of canned Cuban pineapple were rolled in slices of ham. ‘Plain, honest fare,’ my mother would say as she served various combinations of these things. ‘None of your Central Committee foie gras in this household.’ As always in her assertions of humility, family self-esteem was maintained by the unstated, counter-vailing facts of the matter, which were that for most of our visitors, even these relatively modest items represented a gastronomic treat.
It was November – windy and wet. Out of the bleary Berlin night guests began arriving, stamping their chilly feet in the hall, hanging their water-absorbent GDR raincoats on our iron coat rack.
I was in an agitated state. The idea of actually having to stand up in front of these people and reveal the fruits of my dubious labours was suddenly beginning to fill me with fear. For the first time it struck me that somebody might expose me as a fraud.
Uncle Heinrich hadn’t arrived – his work often kept him late. I moved among the guests with waves of tension floating through my stomach. To my surprise, no one mentioned the performance they had made me promise to give. Either they had all forgotten, or – as I began to suspect – they had reached a tacit agreement among themselves to let the matter drop. Did they feel sorry for having pressured me? Or was it that they were really not very interested in hearing me read after all? Despite my anxieties, I found myself strangely resenting both of these possibilities. After an hour or so, I saw Uncle Heinrich’s official limo – an old Czech Tatra – pull up on the street below. He came in, his usual kindly self, apologising for his lateness with a humility that never failed to flatter these people, any one of whom he could have destroyed with no more than his signature on a piece of paper.
He greeted me warmly, but he too failed to mention my promised reading. My deepening stage fright was compounded by a new anxiety, that I might not actually be called to the stage at all. The milk of human kindness may not have flowed in our household, but the milk of judicious approval for prowess in sanctioned fields could occasionally be made to trickle. It was the only nourishment going, and I evidently thirsted for it.
Across the room I saw Franz Erhardt speaking with my uncle. I drifted over. Erhardt watched me approach, smiling thinly as I arrived, without pausing in his talk. I felt sure that he of all people could not have forgotten my reading, and was deliberately avoiding the subject out of professional rivalry. I could feel him willing me to leave, but I stood my ground. Eventually I looked at my watch and sighed so ostentatiously that they were obliged to notice.
‘What is it, dear boy?’ my uncle asked, concerned.
‘Oh, nothing. Just that – well, I suppose I’m going to have to get those poems out. I’ve been dreading this.’
‘Poems? Oh! Of course! Your reading!’
‘I’d really rather not do it, Uncle Heinrich.’
‘Nonsense! No backing down now!’ He wagged a finger at me and summoned my mother over.
‘Stefan promised to read to us. I’d quite forgotten. Now he’s trying to wriggle out of it again.’
My mother looked at me. It seemed to me there was a little movement, a vague twinge of guilt, in the expressive depths of her eyes, as if she were at the point of supporting me in my alleged reluctance, as my father had the month before. Before she could speak, though, I shrugged my shoulders and said with an air of defeat:
‘All right, I’ll read them, if that’s what you all want.’
I went to fetch the pages from my room. When I returned, the guests had been assembled in a circle around the piano, where Erhardt had read the previous month.
I had never addressed an audience before. My mouth had gone dry and my heart was pounding in my chest. The rows of people before me resembled nothing so much as the teeth of a gaping shark, ready to tear me apart. I wanted to flee from it, but it seems I also wanted to put my head in its mouth.
I managed to recite what I had written. The guests listened in silence, and when I finished there was applause.
For the record, the English equivalent of the lines I concocted would have sounded something like this:
I celebrate myself, myself I sing
And my beliefs are yours, as everything
I have
is yours, each atom. So we laze –
My soul and I – passing the summer days
Observing spears of grass . . .
And so on – an anodyne burble that was clearly too boring to raise suspicion. At any rate, nobody unmasked me.
But I realised almost as soon as it was over that not everything was as it had been before. The room may have been the same – the atmosphere of simulated conviviality certainly felt unchanged – but I myself was changed.
At first I didn’t understand what had happened, but as the evening continued, with every guest obliged to make some kind of congratulatory remark, I realised that my attitude towards other people had undergone a radical alteration. Quite simply, the straightforward relation of cordial respect, or at least neutral interest, that is supposed to exist between people who have no prior reason not to respect each other was no longer available to me. It was gone, as if a cord had been cut. In its place, it seemed, was an intricately shuttling machinery of silent interrogation and devious concealment. Everyone I spoke to seemed newly illuminated by what I had done. Depending on certain minute signals given off by the movement of their eyes or the inflection of their voices (I felt suddenly attuned to these things), they were disclosed either as fellow hypocrites in whom the cord had also been cut (they had seen through my deception but weren’t saying so), or else as innocent fools (they hadn’t the guile to see through my deception). I was no doubt wrong in most of my individual diagnoses, but the idea that such a division might exist – between those in whom the cord has been cut, and those in whom it remains intact – was a revelation, and I still find myself appraising the people I meet on that basis.
My Uncle Heinrich, whose voluble enthusiasm for my performance led me to categorise him among the innocents, proposed that I should give another recital soon, since this one had been such a success. The proposal was immediately seconded by the person he was talking to, and by the logic of escalation that prevails in circumstances where power alone has meaning, someone else then had to suggest that I do it the very next month, only to have someone else trump them by saying I should do it every month. ‘That way we’ll all be able to witness first-hand the development of your young prodigy, Frau Vogel.’ And before I knew it, I was looking at the prospect of my little act of stealth, which I had thought would now be cast off into the back-draft of history, having instead to be repeated, month after month after month.
There was one small upset before the soirée ended. A guest went into the bathroom and discovered Otto slumped on the floor, dead drunk. He had passed out while throwing up into the toilet.
Otherwise, the evening was considered a triumph, and for the next period of my life I devoted most of my energies to maintaining the façade of ‘poet-intellectual’ that my mother’s warped pride had created and that I now began to half believe in myself.
It was a peculiar kind of drudgery – exhausting, depleting, and yet somehow compulsive. Like an inhabitant of hell – the hell of Sisyphus and Tantalus – I had a task, a labour, all of my own, and I felt inextricably bound to it. In its service life became a series of furtive routines. The stealing of the aquavit. The concealment of the theft. The bribing of Brandt. The removal of the key from his waist. The dark half hour in the storage room where I opened the trunk and copied the selected pages. The turning of the pages into ‘poetry’. And then finally the nacreous glory of my monthly soul-bath in that crowd of admiring, captive faces.
A few years later, when I was making a private study of the career of Joseph Stalin, I came across descriptions of his seventieth birthday: the enormous portrait of him suspended over Moscow from a balloon, lit up at night by searchlights; the special meeting of the Soviet Academy of Sciences honouring ‘the greatest genius of the human race’ . . . The festivities culminated in a gala at the Bolshoi Theatre where the leaders of all the world’s communist parties stood up one by one to make elaborately flattering speeches to Stalin, and lavish him with gifts. One can imagine his state of mind as he sat on the stage receiving these tributes – the absolute disbelief in the sincerity of a single word being uttered; the compulsive need to hear them none the less; the antennae bristlingly attuned to the slightest lapse in the effort to portray conviction . . .
It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator.
CHAPTER 3
One day I arrived home from school to find Otto remonstrating in a loud voice with my mother. I wandered into the kitchen, where the scene was taking place. Otto’s broad, open face was a burning red colour. My mother was at her iciest.
‘What I’m wondering is what kind of personal inadequacy this behaviour signifies. Perhaps it makes you feel more grownup to get drunk, is that it?’
‘But I didn’t do it!’
‘It’s a little pathetic, Otto, the thought of you sneaking in here to steal alcohol and then – what? – drinking it all alone under your blankets? Or is this what you do when you lock yourself in the bathroom?’
Otto flushed a deeper red. Although he had successfully defied my mother over the matter of becoming an artist, he still hadn’t fully weaned himself of the need for her fundamental approval, which meant that he was still partly under her control. On her side, I think the threat of his independence of spirit made her more anxious than ever to test her power over him. She was constantly needling him at this time. Sometimes he would explode at her, as he had over the drawing classes, but more often he would simply come to a standstill, immobilised by a mixture of hurt, incomprehension and a need to be reinstated in her good opinion.
‘It’s also a bit unmanly. But perhaps you don’t wish to grow into a real man. Perhaps you find the career of a social parasite more appealing? Do you? I ask because I assume you realise that that’s where all this is leading . . .’ The ‘all’ here derived from the fact that he had made himself sick with alcohol on two or three other occasions since the evening of my ‘triumph’.
Otto’s voice had grown strained, constricted. He gritted his teeth. ‘I didn’t take the aquavit. Somebody else must have taken it.’
I leaned against the enamel sink, observing. This was my life unfolding here, but it appeared to be doing so through the medium of someone else, as though it had acquired an existence separate from me.
‘I see. You prefer to get someone else into trouble than face up to your own weakness. All right, let’s hear it. Who would you like to accuse of stealing the bottles?’
‘I don’t know.’ Otto glanced at me, then looked uncomfortably away. He shrugged.
‘Stefan could have taken them just as easily . . .’
I said nothing. It was clear to me that I didn’t need to object to this or deny it. My absolving was embedded in the logic of the scene, and required no contribution from me personally.
‘Ah,’ my mother said, ‘I’m beginning to understand. You’re suffering from jealousy of your younger brother. Well, well.’
‘What? I’m just saying he could –’
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Otto, but I believe it was you who passed out drunk on the bathroom floor the night Stefan first read his poems? I’ve been trying not to regard that as an episode inspired by anything so petty-minded and bourgeois as envy. I hoped it might have been simple exuberance at your brother’s success. But I see I must have overestimated your character.’
Otto blinked in a bewildered way, his large hands hanging helplessly at his sides.
‘I . . . do . . . not . . . envy . . . Stefan!’ He spoke thickly, as if from a deep fog of pain. I knew intimately what he would be feeling: the intolerable sense of injustice, the animal-like bafflement at his tormentor. It would be hypocritical to say that I was immune to the vague dispassionate satisfaction any child experiences at the chastisement of a sibling, but at the same time I could almost feel the lump that I knew to be thickening and welling in his throat, thickening and welling in my own.
‘Perhaps it’s my fault as a mother. Perhaps I s
hould never have encouraged Stefan in his talent once it became clear that you were without talent. But notice how frankly I can speak to you about this. Do you understand why? Because your lack of talent has never made you a lesser person in my eyes. In your own eyes, perhaps, but in mine, no. We happen to be lucky enough to live in a society that values all individuals equally, provided they are honest and productive, and I’ve always assumed anyone brought up in my household would have the intelligence to see that this was as true inside the home as out. Was I wrong, Otto? Have I made you feel less important than your brother? Is that why you stole from us? Please answer me. I’m trying to understand you. It may even be that I owe you an apology for overestimating your –’
And suddenly Otto did explode. Like a mad bull he threw himself around the kitchen, picking up plates and glasses and smashing them on the floor, all the while roaring wildly with rage. Casting about for something more spectacular to destroy, his eye lit on the instant coffee wireless my father had brought back from New York. Too status-rich to languish in the privacy of a bedroom, yet too obviously out of place in the living room, this now occupied a prominent shelf in the kitchen, visible from the corridor outside, the chrome letters of its maker’s insignia always polished to a high gleam. Grabbing it from the shelf, Otto paused a moment, looking directly at my mother, as though waiting for a further signal from her before deciding what to do with this revered object.