by James Lasdun
‘Did you really think so?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely!’ I assured her.
She seemed uncomfortable with the flattery, and yet when the old man seized her back and I moved politely away, I did so with the distinct feeling that she had been half hoping for me to continue in the same vein.
CHAPTER 10
Early evening. Fifteen or twenty people grouped around the chipped marble tables of the Mikado Café. I wandered in, taking a seat at the edge and nodding at my new acquaintances. Inge was there. She smiled at me, but distractedly, and before I even consciously registered who the person sitting next to her must be, I felt my spirits sinking.
He was a large man, tall and very broad, with a reddish complexion that gave his lightly pigmented eyes a hot quality. I sensed immediately that he was not one of my kindred spirits from the privilegentsia: a decade or two of physical labour was clearly visible in the knotted ligatures of his enormous hands, which sat restlessly before him on the round tabletop, crouched and alert-looking.
I didn’t hear him speak much on that occasion, but he was unmistakably the centre of attention. The impact of a recent graffiti campaign in Weimar was being discussed, and most of the remarks were addressed directly to this man. He acknowledged each with a smile – brief, but managing to convey considerable warmth in its short moment.
He was from Jena, that much I knew. What Prenzlauer Berg was to Berlin, Jena was to our republic as a whole. Napoleon had smashed the Prussian army there. Marx received his doctorate from the university. The Workers’ Uprising that nearly toppled Ulbricht and his cronies in ’53 was sparked off in its streets. And now, thirty years later, it was a hotbed of what our security services labelled ‘hostile-negative activity’. Doubtless I was projecting a certain envious admiration, but all this seemed contained in this man’s fiery aura.
Inge looked tense beside him, I remember thinking; a bit diminished in his presence. She was hanging on his words, his silences rather, with her characteristic watchful attentiveness, though in a manner more suggestive of anxiety than the simple generous empathy it usually conveyed. The two of them left the café soon after I got there, followed by a man I took to be their tail (these things were conducted with blatant openness), and the gathering quickly lost its coherence.
‘Thilo Hartman,’ came the voice of Margarete, who had sidled up behind the gilt-bronze chair I’d perched myself on. ‘Inge’s fiancé. Turned up last night. They’re in a big fight already.’
I nodded, having by now guessed who the man was. I didn’t ask what the fight was about – I was feeling suddenly reluctant to acknowledge any interest in Inge, even to myself. Margarete told me the story anyway. Thilo had arrived in Berlin last night, but instead of going to see Inge in Macbrecht (the actors had been released, and the play was on again, without the badges), he had spent the evening with another friend, a woman.
‘They have an open relationship,’ Margarete informed me with a knowing look, ‘both ways, though only Thilo takes advantage of it these days. He’s always pushing her to go out with other men, but she won’t – not any more. She claims not to care about the girlfriends. What makes her mad is he refuses to take her acting seriously. Won’t even bother seeing her plays.’
‘It doesn’t sound as though they’re too well suited to each other,’ I said, affecting a yawn of indifference.
‘He was just in prison,’ she continued, ignoring my comment. ‘Supposed to’ve been serving a three-year sentence, but they let him out . . .’
I listened to the story, unsure whether Margarete was trying to taunt me with the feebleness of my achievements next to those of my rival, or spur me into action, but either way I found myself feeling increasingly deflated as she spoke. He and some others had staged a silent protest in the main square in Jena, sitting in a circle and unfurling a banner with the word Peace on it. A so-called ‘Working Class Combat Group’ had beaten them up and dragged them off to jail, where they would have been languishing still, had there not been an international outcry on their behalf, prompting the authorities to free them. Most of the protesters had been expatriated – sold to the West for hard currency under the Freikauf system that Inge and I were eventually to take advantage of. But not Thilo:
‘He wouldn’t go. He refused!’
Unlike so many of his radical brethren, Thilo had apparently no desire to convert his oppositional temperament into a ticket out. His business, as he saw it, was here among the browbeaten souls of our republic – working men and women whose parched existences he was intimately familiar with from the large variety of jobs he’d held since leaving school at sixteen. Margarete listed these for me – glassblowing in the former Zeiss factories in Jena, shipping beets and barley in thousand-ton barges down the Saale River, hacking out lignite from the strip mines of northern Thuringia – her tone, whatever her intent, reaching me as distinctly taunting.
‘They could have expelled him but they didn’t want another Biermann on their hands,’ she concluded with a sadistic little smile. Wolf Biermann, poet and folk idol, whose forced expatriation a decade or so earlier had given the opposition an unforeseen rallying point. Hearing Thilo’s name coupled with his was galling to me, to say the least.
‘And meanwhile he can’t be bothered to see his fiancée’s plays,’ I said, intending to strike a note of lofty, detached scepticism about the man’s character.
‘Ah, but they’re in love,’ Margarete replied.
As I looked for the usual glint of mischief in her eyes, I saw to my dismay that for once she was speaking in earnest.
And she was right: they were deeply in love, these two; and despite their difficulties, they were well suited too. In an exhibit of Aztec art that Inge and I saw a few years later in New York was a life-sized sculpture of a naked young man and woman sitting cross-legged next to each other, gazing fiercely out into the distance, each with a hand casually on the other’s knee. The moment I set eyes on it I thought of Inge and her former fiancé. With their burning, outward-directed gazes, their affection – so casually signalled but nevertheless the attitude they were carrying forward into eternity – their vulnerable aura from having been immortalised in a condition of such fierce and youthful vitality, they called to mind the relationship I had insinuated myself into, bringing it back so powerfully and painfully that I almost blurted out loud: That’s you and Thilo . . .
The ‘open’ nature of their relationship both was and was not as Margarete described it. It may have been true that in practice it applied more to Thilo than Inge, but it wasn’t the opportunistically one-sided proposition I’d understood it to be from Margarete’s description.
Inge revealed to me that the arrangement had been her idea in the first place – an attempt (characteristically well intended and extreme) to accommodate the full, complicated reality of their needs and desires as adult human beings; a deliberate refusal to flinch from any truth about themselves simply because that might cause pain. And I learned from Thilo that his attempts to get Inge to ‘spend time’, as he put it, with other men was sincere to the point that he himself sought out men he thought she would get along with, and sent them in her direction, and furthermore that when she did decide to spend time with one or another of them, he, Thilo, would be racked by such torments of jealousy that on one occasion he had actually bitten a mouthful of flesh out of his own forearm to drown out the pain. He’d shrugged at my bewildered look (I was out of my depth in these waters): ‘You love someone,’ he said, ‘so you want them to be free. And you want to be free yourself. Here, see . . .’ He pulled up his shirtsleeve. The scar, a jagged-edged crater in the reddish-haired swale of muscle below his elbow, remains in my mind’s eye as the counterpart to Brandt’s livid disfigurement: it was the badge of a mad, fanatic, passionate innocence.
CHAPTER 11
‘. . . Yes, but if one has devoured the language, then one has eaten the order it represents as well . . .’
Menzer again. Holding court amid the book p
iles and junk furniture of his spacious squat.
The occasion was a new issue of one of his literary magazines. He and his friends published several of these magazines, filling them with esoteric poems and articles.
‘Where’ve you been? Inge’s been asking for you,’ Margarete had told me when I drifted back to Prenzl’berg (as I had now learned to call it) after a few days’ absence. ‘Come to Menzer’s tomorrow. She’ll be there – alone. Fiancé’s back in Jena.’
And there she was, frailly luminous in the afternoon light, sitting by the far window. She smiled at me. The smile, like all her expressions, had a cleanness about it: the transparent registering of a simple motion of the heart, unclouded by the equivocations that afflict most of the looks one receives in adult company.
‘Hello, Robert,’ she said.
‘Stefan,’ I corrected her.
‘Stefan! Of course! How stupid of me! I’m so sorry!’ She looked so upset by her mistake that the sting it caused me gave way at once to a chivalric urge to protect her from her own mortification.
‘Don’t worry about it – please!’
She gestured at the seat beside her – a stool made of stacked tyre hubs – and I sat down. We looked at each other in silence for a moment, while Menzer’s drawl rose over the din of other voices across the room, buoyed on its little cushion of self-delight.
‘. . . a poetics of silence speaking between the signs . . . Absolute bankruptcy of the language of power . . .’
‘How’s the play going?’ I asked Inge, my own voice sounding a little thin in my ear.
‘It’s finished. We’re rehearsing a new one.’
‘Oh, yes? What is it?’
She told me about the new play. She seemed to enjoy talking about it, and as I wanted her to associate me with pleasurable sensations, I questioned her at some length. In our last conversation I had formed the suspicion that she mightn’t be altogether immune to flattery, and I found myself looking for opportunities to make subtly complimentary remarks about her acting. She responded to these with evident pleasure – not in a way that suggested any conceit about her work; quite the opposite: even though she had performed in several major productions, she turned out to be insecure about her abilities. She told me that she had never had any formal training.
‘That’s astonishing!’ I heard myself exclaim. ‘How did you learn to control an audience like that?’
‘Oh, I don’t . . . Well . . . It’s nice of you to say that . . .’
‘I mean it.’
She settled her eyes on mine, her expression neutral. I felt her taking my measure, sizing me up on some delicate internal instrument of appraisal; not yet entirely sure, after all, what it meant to be complimented by this newcomer to her circle.
After a while Menzer and his friends read poems from the new magazine. Paul Boeden, Katje’s blond-bearded brother, read first, delivering his lines in what seemed to me an affected monotone. When Menzer himself followed, I saw where Paul had borrowed the tone from, though in Menzer’s case the flatness seemed natural, even compelling; as though one were being read to by a dead man – a grey-skinned, shadow-filled ghost, come from beyond the grave to amuse himself with some private joke at the expense of the living.
Klaus Menzer, that supremely detached man . . . In the first of two interviews he gave Stern after reunification, I caught at once that amused, bored, circuitously self-aggrandising air of his. My mother had sent me the piece. ‘Total indifference to the Stasi was our attitude.’ I could hear the languid drawl. ‘They’d drag me in for questioning every few months, but I never cared – didn’t even hold it against them . . .’ He got his artist’s visa, his Kunstlervisum, in ’87, a year after Inge and I had left, and set up in West Berlin as an art critic, his pronouncements on the death of this or that time-honoured medium of human creativity – sculpture, painting, drawing – rapidly establishing him as a player at the high-stakes museum-culture tables of Western Europe. His second interview, a year after the first, was another story altogether, and I must try not to let it colour my portrayal of the Menzer I knew, or thought I knew. The truth was I admired him – so much that I even began borrowing some of his mannerisms myself. It’s almost funny, I would hear myself drawling, or it’s almost boring . . . And even knowing what I do know about him now, I am hardly in a position to despise him. That, as he might say, would be almost hypocritical.
After the reading was over, I turned back to Inge, intending to continue monopolising her. But before long Paul Boeden came up and stood just behind me.
‘How’s life, Inge?’ he said, cutting right across me.
In her usual flustered way, Inge looked helplessly back and forth between us. With a show of good grace, I moved aside to make room for Paul. He gave me a brisk nod. Though we hadn’t mentioned our shared past, I had the sense that he knew who I was, and this made me wary of him. He also appeared to be on easy terms with Inge, which further added to my discomfort at his intrusion.
I am trying to account here for the ill-judged step I made a few minutes after he joined us.
Inge had just congratulated him on his reading.
‘Stefan’s a poet too,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that right, Stefan?’ she added, putting her hand on my arm. ‘Margarete told me . . .’
I knew she was saying this just to make conversation, but her gesture – the warm interest it seemed to promise if only what she was saying were in fact the case – made me momentarily giddy.
‘A poet? Really?’ Paul asked, raising an eyebrow. I felt suddenly that he knew exactly who I was – knew all about my father’s disgrace, perhaps even about my own humiliation at the hands of his sister, and that in his mind this gave him the right to look down on me.
Among the few things I took in during my stint in the Philosophy Department at Humboldt was the idea – I forget whose – that the underlying motive for all human action is the desire for recognition – recognition of one’s worth and dignity as a human being, without which one was a nonperson; a slave. The concept had articulated very precisely the obscure cravings of my own soul, and it had lodged itself in my imagination. It had felt incontrovertible. And it was surely what motivated me now as I replied to Inge and Paul’s question with a gesture of assent – half nod, half shrug – feeling instantly the immense weariness of spirit that, in my experience, accompanies the discharging of all such acts of self-destructive folly.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah?’ Paul replied, baring his teeth in a smile that seemed to me fully Brandtian in its mocking incredulity. ‘Where can we read some of your stuff?’
I hesitated. Inge was looking at me with a pleasant, innocent smile, waiting politely for the simple answer to a simple question. I didn’t feel that she herself was all that curious as to where she could read my ‘stuff’, and my answer, when I gave it, wasn’t to impress her so much as to prevent any suggestion arising in her mind that I might be a less than straightforward character. As far as Paul was concerned, I perhaps was guilty of wanting to impress him; to force him to ‘recognise’ me. The situation became further complicated by the fact that Menzer, who had been wandering in our direction, was now within earshot. With a feeling of reckless abandon, I blurted:
‘Sinn und Form.’
‘Sinn und Form? No kidding!’
Sinn und Form had been the leading journal of the literary establishment throughout my childhood, and as far as I knew, still was. My Uncle Heinrich was a subscriber and occasional contributor, and always brought the latest issue with him when he came to visit. I never read it, but its sober appearance, lying on the coffee table, was as permanent a feature in my private landscape as the Kurt Teske nude or the American radio (before Otto smashed it). It was a part of who I was, which is no doubt why its name tripped so readily off my tongue.
‘Have I died of boredom or did I just hear the words Sinn und Form?’ Menzer drawled, joining us.
‘This man’s published his poems there,’ Pau
l told him.
Menzer looked at me, as if noticing me for the first time. To my surprise he treated me to a smile –a half smile, at least – and held out his hand to me.
‘By the way, I’m Menzer,’ he said. ‘We haven’t met properly.’
‘Stefan Vogel.’
‘I didn’t mean to be rude there. That’s good, getting your stuff in Sinn und Form. Almost impressive. I used to try them myself. They never accepted anything, so naturally I pretend to despise them for being hopelessly middle-of-the-road. Which issues are your poems in? I’d like to read them.’
I’d seen that last bit coming, at least, and by the time he got to it, my sprinter’s imagination, with its knack for the short-term solution, had come up with an answer:
‘They were only just accepted. I think they’ll be out in the next issue.’
‘Good. Well, be sure to bring it along when it comes out.’
‘I will.’
‘I’d like to read them too,’ Inge said, smiling at me.
And there I was: back on the treadmill again, back in my little hell of vainglory, deceit, and desperate expedient. And whereas the price before had merely been a few years of my manhood, it was now apparently to be my soul.
CHAPTER 12
I see that I am slowing down as I reach this part of my story. As a matter of fact, I seem to be grinding to a halt. It’s October now – almost a month since I began: a month-long torrent of memory, spilling out with unexpected swiftness and ease. (Possible I overestimated this writing business? It seems straightforward enough when you have something to say.) But now I feel as though I’m back in my room on Micklenstrasse before I raided my mother’s trunk, trying to wring a poem out of my own dry brain . . . I seem to have a strong reluctance, even now, to resurrect the events that took place over the next few months: dusting off the old anthology to create another little set of masterpieces (Brandt had gone by then, replaced by an obliging woman with a cheerful smile for everyone); taking them up to my Uncle Heinrich in his book-filled room in the Office of the Chief of the People’s Police; brazening out my own shame to ask if he would do me a little favour and recommend my efforts to the editors of Sinn und Form for their next issue . . .
