Seven Lies

by James Lasdun

  Can’t seem to drag myself back there. Can’t bring myself to spell it all out even in the knowledge that I will be past caring by the time Inge or anybody else gets to read about it.

  But speaking of that there is perhaps another factor in this sudden inhibition.

  A few days ago I did something I’d been meaning to do for some time: double-check on the terms of our life insurance policy. Just as well I did, as I appear to have a certain amount still to learn about the defensive instincts of large capitalist institutions. It turns out that what I have in mind is not after all the ticket to an easy quarter of a million dollars for Inge. All the insurance company pays out in that event is the sum of what you’ve paid in: a few hundred bucks at most. So much for ‘converting myself into gold’.

  A blow. Not that the future awaiting me, so eloquently summarised by that glass of wine in my face, becomes any more conceivable. Life without Inge – a certainty once these revelations break her spell – is a prospect I have zero interest in pursuing. From my point of view she is life; all I want of life. I have felt this since I carried her off from Berlin, and the years since have merely strengthened that feeling. Even so, without the consoling lustre of making her rich (or at least giving her the means to relaunch herself into her own life), the act of aborting that future becomes suddenly a bleaker, starker matter. Hence, no doubt, my Scheherazade-like reluctance to get to the end of this tale.

  Perhaps I should simply tell what happened from Inge’s point of view; that way I could get around certain more delicate matters arising from my visit to my uncle, without being untruthful.

  If I did this, the story would present Thilo’s sudden rejection of Inge as an act of inexplicable callousness on his part, unwarranted even by the fact of his latest arrest, this time on the graver than usual charge of sedition.

  Out of the blue (this version would go), hand-delivered by our ever-solicitous friend Margarete Menzer, Inge receives a smuggled jail note from her fiancé, telling her coldly to forget about him, advising her to forget about politics too and concentrate on her acting, since that was evidently where her heart was, and then laconically informing her that a few days before his arrest he had married an old girlfriend in Jena, a full-time activist in the peace movement. Margarete solemnly confirms the story, citing the testimony of a friend of hers in Jena who was present at the wedding ceremony.

  Distraught, and unable to make contact with Thilo himself, Inge increasingly takes refuge in the sympathetic companionship of her new friend, Stefan Vogel. The quietly supportive attentions of this young man have already won her affection, so that when the bolt from the blue arrives – Thilo’s arrest and sudden marriage – his friendship assumes a new importance.

  What follows does so with a rapidity that feels at once exhilarating and utterly out of step with any real developments in her heart. The latter will come in their own time, she tells herself. Meanwhile, she finds it strangely pleasurable to violate the delicate mechanism of her own emotional nature; to subvert or even destory the Inge Leibus on whom the pain of rejection by the one man she has ever loved has been inflicted.

  One Saturday, on a perverse whim, she suggests to Stefan that they go to the horse races, something she has never had the slightest interest in doing before now. Ever obliging, Stefan takes the S-Bahn with her out to the Hoppegarten Racetrack. They sit together in the sunny freshness of the spring day, high up in the red brick grandstand, with a copy of the Rennkurier, picking out horses for each other to bet on. The racetrack has a pleasantly raffish atmosphere. With its smells of sweat and beer and horse dung, not to mention the distinctly uncommunist financial activities permitted to take place within its precincts, it gives one the feeling of having been released into a tolerant, almost relaxed universe. This isn’t of course the case, as the large number of purple-trousered Soviet officers strolling about with their girlfriends testifies, but even this sanctioned, illusory freedom raises the spirits. And perhaps because the horses themselves, by their sheer vividness and grandeur, succeed in temporarily ousting any civic agency from the centre of one’s consciousness, it allows one to occupy one’s body as an animal of flesh and blood for a moment, rather than as a ‘citizen’ or a ‘comrade’.

  A fraught joy takes hold of Inge. The pain of Thilo’s disappearance continues to ache inside her, but over it a thin euphoric sheen appears to have formed. Impulsively, she puts her hand on Stefan’s shoulder and brushes his cheek with her lips. He laughs his quiet, serious laugh.

  ‘Choose another horse for me,’ he tells her.

  ‘All right.’

  She picks a name at random; a rank outsider. He goes down, places the maximum stake: ten marks. A little later she’s gripping his hand tightly, as they watch the horse thundering past its rivals into the final stretch.

  ‘I’ll take you out to lunch’ Stefan offers, fanning the winnings in his hand.

  They lunch at the Müggelturm Restaurant, Inge ignoring her heaped plate of steak and mushrooms in favour of the sweet Bulgarian wine, gazing with increasingly heavy-lidded eyes at the sleek faces of the party functionaries and their pampered-looking mistresses feeding around them.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ she murmurs. Stefan smiles gravely, takes her hand across the table, squeezes it gently, brings it to his lips with a look of tentatively ironic gallantry and plants a kiss on it. She smiles, feels a pang of longing for Thilo that threatens to spill over into a sob, and swallows it back down with a gulp of syrupy wine.

  ‘Take me home, Stefan.’

  As they walk arm in arm down the street, they pass one of the Exquisit boutiques where imported luxuries are sold for Western currency. As with the racetrack and the restaurant, Inge has never before entered such a place. In the high-minded world of her father’s home and the peace movement, it is second nature to believe that the one thing worse than failed communism is successful capitalism.

  But after all, she has just been betting on the horses, hasn’t she; getting half drunk at a well-established symbol of the hypocrisy of the higher echelons of the party; and wasn’t it Thilo himself who told her to forget about politics? All right, then: so be it. Let the cup of degradation be drunk to its dregs! They slow to a halt at the entrance to the boutique, then wander in together without a word.

  The goods – heavy binoculars and cameras, thick crystal bottles of perfume, lustrous Italian shoes and ties – have a charged presence unaccounted for by their ostensible function. Bathed in the brownish light of their display cases, they seem to her like ceremonial objects from some occult religion. In her heightened state, she feels as though she has entered the force field of some immense and distinctly sinister power. She touches the black lamb’s-wool collar of a short, beautifully tailored coat made of green suede. A little to her surprise she sees that it is communist-built rather than Western: Interpelz, the label reads. Down some new conduit of thought, opened no doubt by the Bulgarian wine, runs the somewhat chimerical idea that this, unlike the Western items, would be an acceptable possession; that it represents not the familiar idea of luxury based on exploitation and exclusion, but a token fetched back from some egalitarian utopia of the future, where everyone will be dressed in such a coat, and that to own it would merely be to assert one’s faith in such a future.

  ‘Why don’t you try it on?’ she hears Stefan say.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Look how much it costs.’ She holds the price tag out to him.

  ‘Try it on anyway. I’d like to see how you look.’

  With an apprehensive glance at the store clerk, Inge slips off her flimsy anorak and swims her hand down the fleece-lined sleeves of the coat. It fits perfectly, gloving her long-armed torso like a second skin, the collar soft against her neck.

  ‘My God, you’re beautiful,’ Stefan murmurs. The words seem to come from him involuntarily. He is gazing at her in what appears to be a state of mesmerised admiration. It makes her a little uncomfortable, but also – she has to admit – excited. For a moment, as
though trying on a new personality along with the coat, she finds herself imagining what it might be like to be the powerful partner in a relationship, the object of such an intense, helpless-seeming veneration.

  ‘I think you should look in the mirror,’ Stefan says.

  She hesitates.

  ‘Come on, have a look.’

  An odd habit of hers, inculcated in her at an early age, is to avoid looking in mirrors.

  ‘Come on, it won’t hurt you,’ he whispers again with a grin. And in the spirit of wilful self-desecration that has been upon her all day, she moves with him across the floor to the full-length mirror.

  ‘How about it?’

  She looks in the mirror. As always on reacquainting herself with her appearance, she has the troubling sense of being confronted by a competing destiny: a happy, thoughtless existence based on physical beauty. The chic cut and glamorising detail of the coat seem to pull her almost irresistibly into this glazed, alternate image of herself.

  ‘I don’t care for it.’ Brusquely, she pulls her arms out of its sleeves and hangs it back on the rack.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says more softly, taking Stefan’s arm and leaning into him, ‘you were supposed to be taking me home.’

  They move back out into the pale afternoon air.

  There should be a word for this, she thinks, this processional journey of two people walking through grey city streets to a house where they know they are going to make love for the first time. She is aware that, however little premeditation she may have given it, she has amply signalled her readiness for this, and that Stefan, in his tactfully low-key way, is already in the process of making the mental transition from companion to lover. There is a quiet purposefulness about him as he walks beside her – an appearance of inward preparation. For her own part, she finds herself moving in and out of the reality of what has begun to unfold. One moment the heavy sweetness of impending desire fills her, bringing with it a sense of darkly consoling oblivion. The next she feels utterly detached.

  The house she’s living in is a clean-scoured, semi-legal squat with a floating population comprised mainly of members of the women’s peace movement. There’s a sound of voices from the communal downstairs rooms when she and Stefan arrive.

  ‘Let’s go up,’ she says quietly.

  As they climb the uncarpeted wooden stairs to her attic room, she feels again the sting of Thilo’s remark that she should forget about politics. Her life in this house has been nothing but politics – one long, heated conversation that has made its way through the introduction of female military conscription, the forming of peace workshops, the forging of links with Western anti-nuclear movements, and on to the more recently engaged topics of pollution, eco-activism . . . Is Thilo accusing her of faking her interest in all this? And the actions she has taken part in – the Dresden rally back in ’82 where they put candles on the Liebfrauenkirche in defiance of that toadying bishop’s orders; the big provocation a year later when Petra Kelly came over the Wall with her West German Greens and they all unfurled banners together in Alexanderplatz until the cops came and arrested them; the time she helped out a friend of Thilo’s who’d smuggled a matrix printer in from the West, persuading her housemates to let him hide it under the floorboards of the attic room, where it still lies, a great dense slab of glowering illegality – is he telling her that this was all somehow fraudulent too?

  A by-product of her sympathetic attentiveness to other people is that her initial response to criticism tends to be outright acceptance. This can involve a radical (if only temporary) adjustment in the way she inhabits her own mind: a kind of privately performed impersonation of the alternative Inge that her critic seems to be proposing. What if he’s right? she asks herself. What if I only took part in those things because the people I admired, principally Thilo himself, were doing them, and I wanted to impress them? The possibility comes to her that rather than falsifying her nature with Stefan all day today, she has in fact been doing precisely the opposite: casting off certain grandiose pretensions, and reverting to her true essence: that of an actress; hopelessly shallow and chameleonic. Vain too, she adds for good measure.

  As they step into the tiny, mirrorless room, she closes the door behind them and stands still, waiting to see what Stefan will do.

  He smiles at her. His eyes are a stony blue, grained with yellow. A small dimple in his chin emphasises the somewhat bland symmetry of his face, but gives it a nice boyishness too. One thing she definitely could not handle at this moment would be some brawny, hairy-shouldered specimen of feral masculinity. Stefan’s slight frame and unassertive physicality seem to demand minimal internal adjustment and threaten minimal disturbance. He takes her hand in his, and with only the slightest sense of being brought across the threshold of her own psyche, she finds herself being kissed gently on the mouth.

  With Thilo, lovemaking has –had – always a fraught, almost traumatic quality, articulating both their passion for each other and their almighty struggles against their own possessive instincts. Every caress seemed pressurised, wrung into a state of high tension, by those contradictory forces. In its tumultuous way it was an illumination as well as a catharsis, but it tended to leave her feeling shattered too, and in the wake of it she was often left with the troubling sense that she might not, in the final analysis, be a match for Thilo.

  This is child’s play by comparison. The arousal of desire, the disrobing, the entangling of their naked bodies as they lie down on the narrow metal bed, even the statutory pause for the prosaic matter of protection – all proceed with a frictionless simplicity that feels new to her. It has crossed her mind that Stefan might be an inexperienced lover, that she might find herself having to lead the way, but he seems to know what he wants, and in the absence of any conflicting or clearer wants of her own, she becomes ungrudgingly acquiescent. The flat outward gaze of his eyes feeds with evident delight on the surfaces of her body. She is grateful for his apparent ease with the situation. By letting it stand in her mind as the official reaction to it, she is able to marginalise her own unease to the point where it becomes almost imperceptible.

  As she tightens against him, matching his steady movements with her own, she begins to feel less like a human being than a machine: a precision-built, pleasure-feeling automaton, effortlessly going through its paces with another of its kind.

  And it is no doubt precisely by association with this absence of effort, this unaccustomed, frictionless ease, that the fateful word she utters unthinkingly after they finish precipitates itself out of the drowsy vapours of her mind, idling across her lips as she lies sleepily on his bare shoulder:

  Amerika.

  ‘America,’ she hears herself murmur.

  ‘America?’

  ‘America’s where I’d want to go if I ever left this country. I wouldn’t go – I wouldn’t go anywhere German.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  She stares up through the rain-grimed skylight.

  ‘I would want to be in another universe, without any connection to this one, not even the language. Maybe that more than anything . . .’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘I could work there too. I have a director friend who comes here sometimes. He’s always saying he wants to put me in one of his films . . .’

  ‘That’s very interesting . . .’

  The tone of Stefan’s voice is casual, but with her ear against his chest she can hear that his heart has exploded into life. After a long silence, she feels him clear his throat.

  ‘What if I could get you there?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘What if I could get us to America?’

  ‘How could you possibly do that?’

  ‘Vitamin B.’

  ‘Huh? Oh . . .’

  It takes her a moment to translate the rather dated slang.

  ‘You have connections?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I think I could get
us exit visas . . . I mean, with you being a known artist. Would you go?’

  Again, the tone is casual, but under it she can feel the stirring of what appears to be a large preoccupation.

  ‘Would you?’ Stefan urges.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He sits up, gazing down at her with a strange vehemence. An uncharacteristic wildness glitters in his eyes.

  ‘Listen to me, Inge. I’ll tell you something. I’m in love with you. I don’t know if you feel that way about me. But it’s not out of the question that it could happen, right? I mean, you quite like me?’

  She nods. No objection there.

  ‘Well, what I’m saying is there’s no future here. Not even the remotest possibility of happiness. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Do I?’ she answers. ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘So if we can get out, then don’t you think – I mean, why stay?’

  She looks up, saying nothing. He kisses her mouth, brushing the back of his hand over her breasts. The subject seems to have rearoused him. She smiles, feeling a bemused, almost vicarious pleasure as he caresses her. His excitement makes her want to cheer him on. It’s certainly nice to be so unequivocally wanted by someone. And again, in the absence of any clear sense of what she herself wants any more, she can feel the attraction of simply docking onto some desire larger than anything in her own heart and cutting herself adrift.

  ‘So would you?’ he asks again. ‘Would you come?’

  ‘I – I’d have to think about it.’

  ‘Will you think about it?’

  The image of herself in one of her old friend Eric Lowenthal’s movies insinuates itself briefly through her defences. Hadn’t Eric always told her he’d do anything to help her if she ever came West? Privately, or at least in the part of herself that she has hitherto shared only with Thilo, she has always despised Eric’s films a little: simplistic moral tales featuring second- or third-world miseries sentimentally repackaged for first-world consumption. But now that Thilo has so irrevocably repudiated her, perhaps it is time to reconsider: step into that alternate existence she glimpsed earlier in the mirror; wrap herself in the mystique of foreignness and exile, let Eric turn her into one of those glamorous stars of ‘independent’ cinema he had become so adept at manufacturing . . . A sham, no doubt, but not a bad life, perhaps; turning one’s back haughtily on photographers at Cannes, making the odd surprise appearance out of a taxi or limousine at gala charity events for the more austerely worthwhile causes . . .