Seven Lies

by James Lasdun

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sore throat? Persistent cough? Weight loss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. Well, I can’t say for sure till we do a sputum culture, but I must tell you this looks like classic TB shadowing here.’

  ‘I thought TB had been wiped out.’

  ‘Well . . .’ A young man with the wispy beard and palely burning eyes of a Wandervogel in photos from the twenties, except that a shifty movement in them now suggested someone after all not so unfallen: ‘You’re right, of course, it has been wiped out here in the GDR, but we do occasionally see a case of, well, foreign infection.’ A man in whom, like me, the cord had been prematurely cut. ‘Have you travelled abroad? I mean, to the West?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Other members of your family?’

  I shrugged – or rather, animated the shrug that by now resided permanently in my shoulders.

  ‘My father used to travel to New York.’

  ‘New York? I think we need look no further.’

  ‘That was several years ago.’

  ‘Yes, well, this could easily be an old infection, recently activated, assuming it is TB, which I don’t want to say for certain at this stage . . .’ He eyed me intently – trying, I sensed, to rouse me to a more appropriate level of anxiety, or at least curiosity, about my possible plight, than I was showing.

  ‘What happened, by the way? The nurse said you’d had some sort of accident? A fall or something?’

  ‘I was running down some stairs,’ I told him. ‘I tripped on a loose stone and just – went flying.’

  He gave me a look that may or may not have had the Brandtian sneer of scepticism I projected into it.

  ‘That’s all?’ His eyes seemed to flicker briefly over my throat.

  ‘Yes.’

  His interest in the circumstances of my arrival at the hospital, where I had taken myself after two days of privately endured pain, thinking I had broken my rib, was probably without ulterior motive. But by that point in my life – I was seventeen – concealment had become second nature to me.

  A nurse took a sputum sample. Two weeks later I was informed that tubercule bacilli had been cultured from the sample, and that I should report directly to the hospital, to commence treatment.

  So. I had become sick. Quite possibly, I had been sick for some time; sick with something to my ear unequivocally fatal-sounding. It was curable, of course, and the doctor who took charge of my case had no doubt that I would make a full recovery, but this fact seemed to me a minor detail in the overall picture the diagnosis presented to my imagination. This was one of the great annihilating instruments by which nature periodically winnowed out certain forms of weakness from the human species. In identifying me as a bearer of this weakness, she had confirmed a sense that had been growing in me over several years: the sense that I was, to all intents and purposes, already dead.

  I went for my examination every week at first, then every month. My temperature was taken. I was weighed. A nurse stuck a clean cardboard tube into a spirometer. I blew into it while the stylus recorded my lung capacity on the revolving drum of graph paper. From the nurse’s room I drifted somnambulistically on towards the deeper and denser space of the X-ray room. In a cubicle with a poster of Erich and Margot Honecker greeting the Ceausescus outside the Kremlin, I removed my school shirt and jacket, then stepped into the chamber itself, where the radiologist fastened a lead girdle about my waist to protect my seed, my orange seed, then positioned me against the backing plate, angling my shoulders forward to touch the cold metal. ‘Now take a deep breath,’ she would say, at which, with a soft buzzing sound like the perpetual buzzing in my own ear, the rays would probe into me.

  I felt as if I had gone back underground, back to the place of obligatory yet never fully explicable rituals that I had submerged myself in during my storage room phase, repetition once again endowing each stage with a gloomy ceremoniousness. After the X-ray, the forty-minute wait in the passage outside the changing cubicles. Waste bins overflowing with phlegm-sodden tissues. Metal chairs attached to the linoleum –bolted to it, as though a weakness in the lungs had been found to predispose a person towards chair theft. Then a summons down a further set of corridors to a small waiting room, the antechamber to the offices of the physicians themselves. Quieter here; silent, in fact; the silence of thought finally undistracted from mortality – the contemplation of an emphysema here, a pleurisy there, there a lung cancer. My name was called and I walked to the numbered room where my physician awaited me – not the young emergency room doctor but an older man, Dr Serkin, an enigmatic person whom I lacked both the means and the will to understand at the time, and whom even now I find difficult to bring into clear focus.

  He was about sixty. Sixty during the seventies, which meant already twenty and thirty during the thirties and forties. A survivor, then; veteran of the nazification, the denazification, the Marxist-Leninisation of his profession. At first his manner was distant, with the remote, deliberate calm of someone practised in the art of inward emigration. I associated him with the machines – the ancient, cumbrous, beige-enamelled machines – that stood about in the various rooms I passed through on my way to his. He seemed to aspire to their condition of imperturbability, and he projected something of their contained, humming power.

  ‘Come in. Sit down.’

  I sat beside him at a table under the mounted light box. My case notes lay open on the table. Beside each entry was a small pictogram of my lung, which Dr Serkin drew meticulously each week in turquoise ink, with arrows pointing to a mark that represented the infected patch.

  ‘How do you feel today?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Still orange?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many of me do you hear at the moment?’

  ‘Just one.’

  ‘Any buzzing?’

  ‘All the time.’

  He glanced at the notes.

  ‘Here – do you see something?’ Pulling out a blank sheet of paper, he thrust it towards me. A bluish radiance quivered briefly across the white surface.

  ‘Yes.’

  Having felt no symptoms of the illness itself, I was now suffering in numerous ways from its cure. The dense orange capsules of isoniazid I took every morning dissolved in my system like blocks of indelible dye, staining all my bodily fluids an unnatural sunset colour that made me feel like a creature from another planet whenever I sweated or ejaculated. Overstressed by the toxicity of the pills, my liver sent thick drifts of floaters up across my visual field. Sometimes when I looked at a blank sheet of paper I saw palpitations of blue light flicker off the whiteness. My hearing too had been afflicted: a sound like the roll of a soft, insistent snare drum played continuously in my left ear. Occasionally a single voice addressing me would refract into a whole chorus of voices, all declaiming the same words like a massed, menacing choir. Strange as they were, these phenomena seemed to me entirely natural: it was fitting, somehow, that a dead person should see the world of the living through a veil of swarming small print, hear it through a perpetual buzzing or rustling in one ear. Even now, when I learn of a death, the image that comes into my mind is of the deceased person suddenly thrust into a realm where the inhabitants all suffer from acute tinnitus and weep fluorescent orange tears.

  In his remote fashion, Dr Serkin seemed to find these side effects amusing, or at least intriguing, and by association I myself seemed to grow fractionally more interesting in his eyes. As the weeks passed, I sensed a distinct desire on his part to communicate. His habit of mind was apparently such that anything he wished to say had to negotiate its way through a labyrinth of defensive caution, and consequently tended to come out in the form of odd little non sequiturs or else remarks too elliptical or ironic for me to fathom. Not that I was interested in doing so, any more than I was in his more direct attempts to make me open up about myself; an attitude that in retrospect I regret, as I suspect now that he was trying to help
me.

  After the questions about my side effects, he would exchange his look of private amusement for a more businesslike expression, gesturing at me to remove my shirt so that he could begin the painstaking auscultations that preceded the examination of the X-ray. I sat there passively while he tapped and thumped me, listening through his stethoscope to the secret, involuntary confessions of my body. Once, while he was doing this, he began to question me quite insistently:

  ‘So you thought you’d broken a rib? That’s what brought you to the hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fell down some stairs or something?’ Tap-tap-tapping my sternum.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’ Inching the cold stethoscope across my chest.

  ‘I was running. I tripped.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘There was a loose stone.’

  ‘It’s interesting that your heart starts pounding like a jack-hammer when you tell me this.’

  He glances at me. His eyes are large and distantly kind. Unillusioned, but without cynicism. Cord intact. Taking my X-ray from its folder, he clips it to the light box and puts the previous week’s X-ray up beside it for comparison, switching on the light.

  ‘The duty doctor who admitted you mentioned he’d noticed abrasions around your throat. What would that have been from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was somebody trying to strangle you?’

  The choral effect kicks in.

  ‘No.’

  ‘None of my business, eh?’ Fifty voices interrogating me in unison. Commas and colons raining in thick squalls across my eyes . . . I dispense a shrug, saying nothing.

  ‘By the way, you have an unusually large lung capacity. Did you know this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the old days that would have been seen as the sign of a tremendous élan vital.’

  Sullen monosyllable from the patient.

  ‘Which was not unreasonable, given that the oxidation of tissue is the basis of life, and that the lungs provide the means for that oxidation. Would you say that describes you, an unusual vitality? Stefan?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Withdrawing into the tightest corner of myself.

  ‘It’s true, you seem more a Werther type than a Mynheer Peeperkorn . . . But on the other hand . . . well . . . under certain circumstances certain qualities take the form of their opposite. Like a tarot card upside down. Only sometimes it’s the context that’s upside down, not the card, if you take my meaning. I assume they teach you the tarot at school?’ A sudden sardonic glimmer; it and the words themselves vectoring on a point too remote from my frame of reference for me to locate.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are your plans in life, Stefan?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I had a son a few years older than you. An engineer. He wanted to design a car. A fast car. A beautiful fast machine for travelling on the open road. By which he did not mean a new-model Trabant on the Allied Transit Route.’ He gives a dry, violent laugh. ‘And by the tarot, I mean of course the socialist tarot. The Theoretician. The Party Chairman. The Enemy of the People. The Hanged Comrade. That’s one for you, perhaps, Stefan?’

  I see myself beside him at the table, my guard too firmly up against further questioning to take in anything he might be trying to convey to me, let alone anything instructive in the sight of my own rib cage hanging luminously before me on the light box. And I see Dr Serkin peering at the two images, into them, rather, as if he were staring into deep space. The ethereal skeins of tissue, the ghostly vein branches outlining the lungs’ lobules of infundibula, look like maps of the heavens, full of star clusters, strange nebulae, hazy auroras. Closing one eye, the doctor holds his pen up to each X-ray in turn. With his air of powerful, suppressed disquiet, he seems less like a doctor than a tutelary spirit, trying to lead a reluctant initiate to the brink of some new realm of knowledge. A Fluchthelfer.

  ‘What happened? Did you try to hang yourself?’

  ‘No!’

  From a tree in an old quarry in Friedrichshain, Dr Serkin. Overlooking the Spree River. A birch tree with its own diseased core; a rotten branch that broke when I jumped. I didn’t know then that a birch among taller trees was more than likely to be dead; light-starved, decaying from within. I fell onto my back, then the heavy branch, still roped to my neck, came crashing down onto my rib. Not so much a Werther type as a circus clown.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ says the doctor, ‘Felix culpa. Isn’t that what they say? Lucky fall? I mean, if you hadn’t fallen, you wouldn’t have found out about the TB – perhaps until it was too late.’

  You mean if I hadn’t tried to kill myself, I might have died? Is that what you were telling me, Dr Serkin?

  He never mentioned his son again, and I never asked what had happened. One has to feel vaguely human oneself before one can start caring about other humans. Sorgen: to care; so much more absorptive, somehow, of the world’s sorrows than the English word, but not a part of my active vocabulary before I met Inge.

  CHAPTER 6

  Speaking of feeling human, it is now the moment for me to say a few words about our ‘lodger’, Kitty.

  Katerina Rust (to give her her full name) was the daughter of a serving girl, Lotte Rust, who had spent most of her short life on the estate of my mother and uncle’s family near Breslau, in Silesia.

  During the war Lotte and my mother stayed together at the house (a small castle, by all accounts), which was turned into a convalescent home for wounded officers. When the Red Army arrived on German soil and the Reich began falling into the pandemonium that preceded its final collapse, the two women, both still in their teens, fled west together, preserving, by mutual agreement – so my mother claims – the hierarchy of their relationship through thick and thin, surviving refugee camps, marauding troops from General Chuikov’s army, cold, hunger and numerous other indignities arising out of our nation’s unappreciated attempt to spread the gift of itself to the rest of the world. After the dust settled, they found themselves reunited with Heinrich (who had served in the army) in Soviet-occupied Berlin.

  It seems Lotte was an attractive woman. She formed a liaison with a young Russian Comecon officer, a connection that gave the new household definite advantages in terms of political protection and basic necessities. The affair ended abruptly when the officer was posted back to Moscow, leaving Fräulein Rust heartbroken, and pregnant with Kitty. She died of diphtheria when Kitty was six, entrusting the girl’s upbringing to my mother, who fulfilled the obligation in her own fashion. When I was very young, I thought of Kitty as my older sister, but as I grew up I saw that her status in our household wasn’t after all quite that of a fully paid-up family member. Though she was fed and clothed as well as the rest of us, and though there was never any mention of anything so vulgarly uncommunist as servants or mistresses, there seemed to be an understanding between her and my mother that she was to perform all the more menial of the household chores. It was Kitty who swept and dusted, who operated the People’s Own Washer we proudly purchased in the sixties, hooking its hose up to the kitchen sink and standing guard for the hour and a half it took to heat up (someone had to be there in case its gaskets burst); Kitty who served the titbits at my mother’s soirées, Kitty who was sent out to stand in line for bananas or toothpaste or the cans of Schmalzfleisch my father liked to have on his toast for breakfast. She never complained or showed any sign of resenting her position; in fact, she seemed deeply attached to us all, and strangely devoted to my mother, as though she had inherited her own mother’s accommodating humility.

  Humble, yes, and passionate too. The slightest emotional tremor would widen her flecked grey eyes and bring a flush of colour to her pale cheeks. Though she claimed to be intimidated by the ‘intellectual’ tone of our home, and would often describe herself (with curious relish, it struck me) as an ‘ignoramus’ or even an ‘idiot’, she had more real curiosity than any of us. She read voraciously – novels, pl
ays, art history, books about ancient civilisations; anything she could get her hands on. Always, I discovered, with the sense that she wasn’t quite getting the point, wasn’t enough of an intellectual ‘like you or your mother’ to penetrate into the grand revelations about the meaning of life that she was certain lay concealed beneath the surface of the text. She left school at sixteen and apprenticed at a state garment factory, meaning to take her Abitur and go on to a technical institute to learn apparel design, but getting sidetracked instead – into clerical work, administration, bouncing from one secretarial post to another, her neat and pretty appearance keeping her dependably in new bosses whenever she needed a change. And like many people I have met whose buoyant disposition and natural charm should have ordained them, by the laws of nature itself one would think, for a life of uncomplicated happiness, she seemed instead to be doomed to one of serial disappointment and devastation. One after another the men she fell in love with turned out to be shits, thugs, liars or, as in the case of the aforementioned Jürgen, outcasts who could offer her little more than a fleeting, anguished memory of themselves. A recurring motif during my adolescence was the sight of her at the kitchen table, weeping beside my mother, who would offer a selection of dry observations about the man in question and reprove Kitty for her poor judgement. Stony consolation, yet it seemed to be all Kitty wanted, or at any rate felt she deserved.

  At one point, some time in her twenties, she made a determined effort to take herself in hand. She got a place to study textiles at a vocational school in Leipzig – a three-year programme that would lead to the Abitur and then, if she was lucky, to university.

  After a few months in Leipzig she got involved with a chemistry teacher who turned out to be married with three children. As soon as she discovered this, Kitty tried to break off the relationship, but the teacher declared himself to be unable to live without her, and at the same time threatened to orchestrate her expulsion from the school if she stopped sleeping with him. Confused and frightened, she allowed herself to be blackmailed in this way for several months, aware of a gathering tide of disapproval moving towards her from all quarters, as word of the affair got out. Finally she received a visit from the leadership of the school branch of the FDJ, who monitored, among other things, the development of ‘socialist personality’ in the student body, and put it to her that she might benefit from some serious re-education in this department. A week later, distraught, ashen, her eyelids puffy and scarlet-rimmed from continual weeping, she was back with us in Berlin, her plans for self-improvement in ruins.