Seven Lies

by James Lasdun

  ‘Stefan Vogel.’

  She had a small face with thick brown eyebrows and a sharp red nose like a bird’s beak.

  ‘Poet?’ she asked.

  I looked at her, caught off my guard by this inaccurate but curiously pertinent guess. I found that I didn’t want to deny it, though I couldn’t quite bring myself to affirm it either.

  ‘You don’t look like a painter,’ she added, as if by way of explaining herself.

  ‘No –’

  ‘Wrists too thin.’

  ‘I’m not a painter.’

  ‘What I thought.’ She nodded, causing her chin to disappear for a moment into her plump neck.

  I was aware of having somehow used an honest answer to establish false credentials.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  She gave a squeaky laugh. ‘I’m nobody. I’m Margarete. Menzer’s sister.’

  We turned down an alley of derelict buildings with jet-black oblongs where the windows had been. At the end was a free-standing tenement house in better repair (the ground-floor windows were glazed, and the stucco walls appeared to have been spared the defective latex paint that had been slathered over just about everything in the seventies, only to flake off five years later, along with the stucco beneath). The front door was fastened with a heavy padlock. We stopped here, and stood waiting in the drizzle.

  After a few minutes, the tall, bespectacled man I’d seen on the stage before came sauntering down the alley with his own entourage, among them the Macbrecht actor and Inge.

  Smiling faintly at the rest of us while continuing his conversation, the man climbed the steps to the front door and unfastened the padlock.

  My officious companion tapped me on the arm. ‘That’s Menzer,’ she informed me with a little satisfied pursing of her lips. We followed this illustrious-looking personage into the house.

  And so, in that casual manner, I entered into a new phase of my life: the last one before I left with Inge for the West.

  CHAPTER 8

  I say ‘casual’, and that was how it felt, but of course the more one learns about that place and those times, the less plausible the word ‘casual’ comes to seem in connection with even the most trivial aspects of one’s life. From the vantage of the present it seems to me that even at this early stage in the drama that followed, the likelihood is that I was already under the interested scrutiny of powers outside myself, and was already submitting to the guidance of their first, imperceptibly gentle touches.

  Inside Menzer’s house, a bare-floored hallway led into a long, narrow room, cluttered with books, papers, paintings and odd bits of sculpture that on closer inspection turned out to be pieces of furniture improvised out of junk.

  As the twenty or so of us trooped in, Menzer wandered across to a table where something appeared to have caught his eye. He picked up a piece of paper and glanced briefly over it. A look of remote amusement appeared on one side of his handsome face.

  ‘What is it, Menzer?’ a blond-bearded man asked eagerly. This man looked familiar to me, though I couldn’t place him.

  Menzer held out the piece of paper by a corner, though before the man could take it, Margarete darted forward and snatched it with a squeak of laughter. She scanned it rapidly.

  ‘Menzer’s got another Notice to Appear!’ she exclaimed, handing the paper to the other man, who looked at it admiringly, then sent it circulating around the room. It passed through my own hands, though only long enough for me to take in the words Notice to Appear and Normanenstrasse.

  ‘Why don’t they leave you alone, Menzer?’ a green-eyed young girl – no more than twenty – asked.

  Menzer gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Probably they just want to show me they can still get in the house without smashing down the door.’ He crinkled one side of his mouth. ‘It’s almost funny.’

  ‘But what will they do to you?’

  ‘They’ll keep me waiting in a cell for a few hours, then ask me what Westerners I’ve been in contact with. I’ll say Ronald Reagan and the Pope. They’ll threaten to close down the magazine. I’ll tell them be my guest. Then with luck they’ll give me back my Captain Beefheart albums which they stole last time around, and send me over the Wall in a private chopper.’

  Everyone laughed. Bottles of Pilsator beer were opened, cigarettes lit, and some fast, loud music came bursting from a record player in the corner.

  I sat on a painted wooden crate by a bookshelf, amazed to find myself here, and aware that the multitude of at once urgent-seeming and completely puzzling impressions I was absorbing would take time to understand. Aside from the laconically domineering presence of this man Menzer, the principal fact for me at that moment was that Inge Leibus was here in the same room as I was. For some time, out of a mixture of shyness and pride, I avoided looking at her, and spent several minutes studying the bookshelf beside me. On it was a row of books by what appeared to be French authors. The books bore the imprint of a West German publisher, which in my eyes was in itself enough to confer on them an aura of something more like necromancy than literature.

  ‘Who’s out there?’ Menzer called from across the room. He was addressing Macbrecht, who was standing near me, by the window. ‘Yours or mine?’

  Macbrecht looked down onto the alley.

  ‘Yours – I think.’

  Menzer ambled over to the window. A crumpled jacket hung from his narrow shoulders, and the flow of bulges and creases in the material was continued above it in his long, narrow, pale grey face, which owed its handsome effect less to any classical perfection of features than to an alluring but not quite decipherable play of asymmetries about the eyes and mouth, and some oddly placed muscular bumps and hollows down the cheeks, as though the whole form had been elongated and subtly misshapen, by stress perhaps, or unnatural use.

  He opened the window.

  ‘Werner,’ he drawled, not bothering to raise his voice, ‘come in, you idiot. It’s too wet for you out there. You’ll catch another cold.’

  A moment later a sheepish-looking man with a wet moustache came through the door.

  ‘Sit down, have a drink,’ Menzer told him. Margarete darted off for a beer and gave it to the man, who looked at it uncertainly.

  ‘Go on, man!’ Menzer said, hoisting a friendly sneer from one side of his mouth. ‘You think we’d waste our narcotics on the Firm?’

  The man assumed a pious air. ‘I don’t acknowledge that I’m with the Ministry of State Security. I don’t deny it, but I don’t admit it either.’

  This was greeted with jeering and laughter, not entirely hostile.

  Macbrecht lumbered over – a pink-jowled, heavy-breathing man. He planted himself squarely in front of the new arrival.

  ‘So what was that about, Werner, at the theatre?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are we going to get our actors back?’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Yes, that. Are we?’

  The man shrugged, wiping his raggy moustache. He looked unhappily at the floor.

  ‘That’s Werner, with the moustache.’ Margarete had reappeared at my side. ‘Menzer’s tail.’ She nodded importantly.

  ‘You mean Stasi?’ I whispered. I was utterly bewildered.

  Margarete made a harsh tutting sound. ‘No need to whisper. It’s open house here, I told you. Everyone’s invited, Firm included. We’re artists, not politicos. We don’t want to reform the system. We’re just completely bored by it, and we’re too cynical to believe in trying to change it.’

  Perhaps it wasn’t quite so absurdly rote-like, what she actually said, but the way she said it made it sound like some kind of official statement of position.

  Even so, the words themselves struck a chord in me. Boredom, cynicism . . . I could relate to that . . .

  ‘Did you bring some poems?’ she asked me.

  ‘Well, no . . .’

  ‘I’ll show you some of Menzer’s. Wait.’

  She flitted off again. I turned back to the other co
nversation. It had broadened now, and become a little heated, though amicably so. The disagreement was between the theatre people on one side, and Menzer with some like-minded friends on the other. The Stasi man sat between them, morosely sipping his beer, and trying to put in the odd word of his own.

  Menzer was talking. ‘So let me get it straight –’

  He had a nasal, bored-sounding voice, this weary prince, though with a note of incipient hilarity in it as you came to know it better, as if he were continually delighting himself with the things he heard himself say.

  ‘You put on your swords-to-ploughshares badges, you get arrested, then you pretend to be outraged because that was just part of a costume and the cops should have made a distinction between a real illegal display and a metaphorical illegal display, and you create a little disturbance, a little event, and somehow all this is supposed to help avert a nuclear holocaust – is that the idea?’

  ‘Well –’ Macbrecht huffed.

  ‘Somehow this is going to persuade the Central Committee to throw down its weapons and abandon the Warsaw Pact –’

  ‘Well, but –’

  ‘Menzer’s got a point,’ the Stasi man said.

  ‘You shut up,’ Menzer told him. ‘Seriously, Benno, you think wearing a badge –’

  ‘Not in itself, obviously,’ another of the actors began.

  ‘Do you even know where that image comes from?’

  The actors looked uncertainly at each other. I noticed Inge furrowing her brow.

  ‘Do you?’ Menzer repeated with a grin.

  ‘You mean the swords-to –’

  ‘To-ploughshares, yes. That naked muscular blacksmith of yours. You don’t even know where your own emblem comes from? Oh, that’s almost funny!’ He gave a harsh, crowing laugh.

  ‘I know where it comes from,’ I heard myself call out.

  Several pairs of eyes, showing various degrees of quizzical interest, were suddenly gazing at me from across the room. Among them Inge’s.

  ‘It comes from a Soviet sculpture,’ I said, projecting as much appeasing humility into my tone as I could (the last thing I wanted to do was offend anybody).

  ‘That’s right, of course,’ Inge said softly. I looked at her directly for the first time now. She had changed out of her costume into a pale dress with blue tights, the plainness of which, far from diminishing her glamour, seemed rather to have been raised by its wearer to the same level of high expressiveness as the stylised robe she’d been wearing before, though this time in the service of simplicity rather than queenliness.

  She smiled gratefully at me, and a surge of pleasure went through me.

  ‘So even our protest symbols come down to us from the forces we’re protesting against,’ she continued. ‘Is that your point?’

  As on the stage earlier, her quiet voice commanded one’s ear effortlessly, without the need of being raised, as though simply parting the sea of noise on either side of itself.

  Menzer was unfazed: ‘Yes, and I’m glad I don’t have to spell it out, since that would be almost boring.’

  ‘So what are you proposing?’ the other actor asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Menzer said with a smile. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Explore different kinds of silence. Otherwise absolutely nothing. You know as well as I do the whole language is occupied territory – has been for decades. Every time you say a word like peace, all you’re doing is taking your tongue for a swim in a sea of shit.’

  ‘Then why do you bother with your magazines? Why not just join the party and have a career like everyone else?’

  Menzer shrugged. ‘It amuses us to fuck with words. Doesn’t it, Paul?’ He turned to the familiar-looking blond-bearded man who had been standing by his side nodding at his remarks. I remembered suddenly where I had seen him before: in Wandlitz, disappearing off to play with Otto, while I stayed with his sister Katje. He was Katje Boeden’s brother Paul.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe if we fuck with them enough, they’ll turn into something interesting.’

  ‘Like an exit visa?’ Inge said, addressing her words to Menzer, but glancing again in my direction, as if in appreciative acknowledgement of an ally.

  ‘That would be fine by me,’ Menzer replied.

  Inge smiled at him, saying nothing. The peculiar latent power I’d sensed humming inside her when she was onstage was still discernible, but I was struck now by the fact that it no longer felt violent or negative – quite the reverse, in fact: as herself, her strength seemed all gentleness. Her face looked softer – less sharply accentuated at the cheekbones, her hair less blindingly white, less severe in the lines it made against her cheeks and forehead. Only a slight burning quality about her eyes remained of the fanatic look she’d had before, and it seemed an entirely benign fanaticism now.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t she?’ came a voice to my side. Margarete had returned.

  I must have frowned involuntarily.

  ‘It’s OK, I already saw you looking at her in the theatre.’ She grinned mischievously.

  ‘Fiancé’s in Jena. Ignoring her as usual. Hasn’t even been to her play. Here, Menzer’s poems –’

  She handed me a small pamphlet with a nonsensical title made out of numbers and punctuation marks. There was a signed etching of a paper clip on the cover.

  I opened it and looked at some of the poems. Though these were made out of real words, they too seemed to me nonsensical, partly no doubt because I was still absorbing the news that Inge had a fiancé, and trying to conceal the absurdly inappropriate dismay this had provoked in me.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘Inge Leibus was asking who you were after you left the other night,’ Margarete said to me a few days later in the Mikado Café off Kollwitzplatz. Before I had left Menzer’s place Margarete had made a point of telling me I would be welcome at other such impromptu gatherings, giving me the addresses of various locations where they were likely to take place.

  ‘Really? What did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her you were a poet. A great admirer of hers – her acting, I mean.’

  She smirked at me, sheathing her sharp little chin in its cushion of neck flesh. I assumed that her telling me all this was purely tactical: showing herself to be my ally in my pursuit of Inge, so that she could be my consoler when that pursuit failed. Women of her kind of borderline ugliness (to be blunt about it) had gone after me even at Humboldt, evidently considering me to be within their range.

  A day or two later she brought me to an apartment not far from Menzer’s where something between a party and a colloquium was taking place, with people packed into a spartan, smoke-filled room, talking heatedly about the imminent destruction of the planet.

  Inge was there; again dressed simply, but costumed in her own pale beauty that set her in another plane of being – so it seemed to me – from the lesser mortals congregated in the room.

  Margarete insisted on taking me over to meet her properly. She was listening to an agitated old man with thick-lensed glasses and purple, spittle-flecked lips. He was lecturing her on some peace-related matter, and words like ‘Friedenssicherung’ and ‘Friedenswerkstätten’ came sizzling out of his mouth in an angry effluvium of white foam.

  Inge noticed me as Margarete and I drew near, and from a brief stilling of her blond-lashed eyes on mine (as pleasurable as being settled on by some beautiful blue and white butterfly), she seemed pleased to see me. But the old man kept haranguing her, and she either couldn’t or wouldn’t initiate the process of polite disengagement that convention allows at such moments.

  I watched her listening to him: nodding respectfully, almost meekly, as he laboured through his points (an old-time utopian socialist, it appeared, he was cranking out some line about the inherent pacifism of orthodox Marxism); too sweet-natured to manoeuvre herself out of range of his saliva, or rather (as I came to understand) too conscientiously preoccupied with matching his urgent communicativeness with an answering attentiveness of her own, to notice.

  This attent
iveness was one of the qualities I came to love most deeply about Inge; this helpless, profligate giving of herself to whatever creature, human or otherwise, came before her with its needs and demands. In practical terms it could be exasperating – the world’s most crashing bores and self-pitying narcissists, who have an unerring instinct for this kind of natural listener, tended to converge on her wherever she went, and I often had to resort to quite brutal means of dragging her away. But when I picture her now I always see her in this attentive state: her slender body tilting, slightly attenuated, towards the other person, her head at a quizzical angle in its straight-hanging arch of silken hair, her lips which seemed to have a little extra upturning red length at the corners (as if for the expression of joys beyond the capacity of normal humans to experience) open in a gentle smile, her serious eyes proffered like pools of grey-blue, restorative waters.

  The old man certainly wasn’t about to give her up without a fight. When Margarete finally put her hand on Inge’s arm to interrupt her, he just went on talking, only louder and faster, as if his life depended on it, glaring at me furiously. I started to back away, but Inge, aware now of the possibility of wounding someone else’s feelings in addition to his, made a confused attempt to acknowledge Margarete and myself, while still listening to him. I dwell on these minutiae in order to give a sense of what I perceived about Inge at that moment: that she was possessed of an extreme, perhaps even overdeveloped human feeling, and that she was someone for whom the world was evidently too much at times: someone perhaps in need of protection.

  When the old man finally shut up (standing his ground, though, with his lips ominously pursed as though waiting for the first opportunity to unleash another torrent), and Margarete introduced us, I said the first thing that came into my head, which was that I didn’t want to take any of her time, but I just had to tell her how wonderful I thought her performance had been in Macbrecht. Instead of laughing off the compliment, as I expected her to do, she coloured deeply and gave me an awkward smile.