Seven Lies (22 page)

And maybe he was right: maybe what was so catastrophically damaging to me was entirely harmless to him. Who am I, after all, to look back at that face and say with such confidence: ‘Demon'? What do I have to support this view other than my own sense of injury? History? A dubious ally: suppose its verdict had gone the other way (and after all, it has given the victor's laurels to plenty of questionable causes over time, while cutting off plenty of noble ones before they had a chance to flower); suppose his system had triumphed, flourished into the egalitarian paradise it was all along intended to become, then how would my judgement of the lieutenant itself be judged? With precisely that incredulous scorn we reserve for all those pitiful figures from the past who failed, out of stupidity or narrow-mindedness to perceive which way the wind was blowing.

Blickfeldmassnahmen
: our professional term for the act of ‘keeping someone in view'.

Abschöpfung
: our word for ‘pumping'.

I was to keep Thilo Hartman ‘in view'. And, in my capacity as editor of a new and daringly outspoken oppositional magazine, I was to look for opportunities to ‘pump' him.

T
HREE FORTY
. Bare twigs gleaming like polished wires in the low sun. Lichen on tree trunks showing a gaudy bluish green. A breeze comes down over the clifftop; blows a flurry of yellow leaves off the birches, throwing them out into the lake of air where they spin down, catching the sunlight like gold coins.

Always this feeling of something being conveyed, in some not quite intelligible language, by that other world. Sense of being appraised by the stones, recognised for what I am by the trees. And not just from my
Bausoldaten
days of cutting them down.

This strange yearning they provoke in me! What the ancients had in mind with their idea of the self-slaughtered living on as trees in the afterlife? A projection of precisely this intense desire to sidestep one's own consciousness and merge into the backdrop, the landscape?

That time, right after our marriage, when I almost made a clean breast of things to Inge. Sudden sense, as I turned to her, of the power of words to explode in the air like dynamite, and kill. I kissed her instead.

Inge. Thilo marrying that other woman was out of love for you; you must have half known that: free you from the impossible difficulty of being his lover by trying to make you hate him. Though by the time you figured it out you were
here, past the point of no return, while he was – where? In jail? On trial? Alive? Dead? We didn't know: you didn't
want
to know. Your guilt about leaving required you to imagine the worst, and to live as if that were so.

That curious mood of good-humoured resignation he was in during the hour he and I spent together in the little office of my ‘magazine'. As though he knew perfectly well there was as much chance that I was in the process of betraying him even as we spoke, as that I was the sympathetic spirit I pretended to be. Choosing, out of what seemed nothing more than sheer gentlemanly magnanimity, to believe the latter, or at least to act as if he did; to respond to my casual probing with such cordial frankness I was left with the sense that even in the part of his mind that must have intuited, in general terms if not precise detail, the wire leading from the pen in my pocket to the transmitter in the heel of my shoe, he bore no ill will, and possibly even forgave me in advance (almost the hardest part for me to bear, that feeling of forgiveness; of being left entirely alone to absorb all reverberation of harm). That moment, after he had shown me the scar on his arm from biting himself in the attempt to master his own feelings of jealousy while you were dutifully following his injunction to ‘spend time' with other men; right after that, how I abruptly changed the subject – catch him off his guard, as Lieutenant Hager had instructed me – to the question of the Soviet presence on our soil and then the even more taboo subject of reunification; how, as he gave me his truthful, treasonous answers (handing me his own smiling head on a platter), I felt as though I were traversing a rift in nature, from the far side of which all the previous stumbles and tumblings in my lifelong career of falling seemed in comparison to have occurred in a universe of almost childlike innocence!

Yesterday I bought a hunting rifle. I wrapped it in plastic and took it up to the top of the cliff. There's an enormous fallen tree there, with several smaller trees splintered and crushed beneath it. Under its torn-up roots is a hole the size of a bomb crater. I climbed down into this and laid the rifle under a ledge of bedrock jutting in through the dirt near the bottom. Menzer has clear instructions how to find it. Assuming he comes (and I am inclined to think he will), he'll park on the old service road for the transmission tower and make his way up the rocky path to the top of the cliff. From there, having found the rifle, he will move towards the edge of the cliff, where, peering down through the birches below him, he will see the mound of bluestone rubble with the stone bench where Inge's ‘lover' will be seated, wearing a fawn-coloured hat, looking out at the view as he does every afternoon between four and five o'clock. He will take one shot, which will cause no particular alarm, hunting season having opened today. Then he will go home and wait for me to contact him, which, unless I am seriously mistaken about the nature of what awaits me, will take, as they say here, for ever.

T
HREE FIFTY
. A sheen on the horizon now; a tint of green like a tight-stretched band of silk. What else to set down? I went back a few years ago. Back to Berlin: February of 1999, for my father's funeral. He had died of a blood clot in the cerebellum, while playing chess at his social club.

Otto picked me up at the airport. He and I had kept in touch, though he wasn't much of a correspondent. He'd been struggling, I knew that: divorced, in and out of work, though a couple of years earlier he had turned his military training
to advantage, setting up a small garage. A round beard, Amish-style, circled his broad face. It made him look young – the unshaven upper lip – though also prehistoric. He was friendly, a little bemused by me as ever, a little diffident.

‘I've thought a lot about you going to America,' he said as we drove. ‘I've decided it must have had to do with you being a poet, having the imagination to, you know –'

I turned from him uncomfortably, trying not to listen; watching the rain-blurred parallels of Karl Marx Allee unreel on either side of us, grandiose and relentless. In my head I conducted a shattering conversation with him which would begin with my saying:
Remember those aquavit bottles you got in trouble for stealing . . . ?

He must have come to an end, as there was a long silence.

‘Incidentally,' he said, ‘some woman called for you. She wanted to know if you were coming over for the funeral.'

‘Who?'

‘She didn't say. I gave her the name of your hotel. Figured you wouldn't mind.'

He grinned at me in the mirror, the boyish wickedness of the look confirming my sense of his inviolable innocence. Cord intact. I smiled back, trying to conceal the feeling of alarm that had come into me.

We picked up his children from his ex-wife's apartment, then drove on to his garage. My mother, who was managing the business for him, had insisted on putting in a morning's work before the funeral.

She was on the phone at a metal desk in a chilly office when we arrived; repeating out loud some customer's list of mechanical ailments and typing them into a computer smudged all over with oily fingerprints. She had dyed her hair a coppery auburn colour. Her nails were long and red – the
first time I had ever seen them painted. Exhaust pipes were stacked all around her on the cement floor. A stuffed pine marten crouched on the filing cabinet above her, under a calendar with a half-naked girl straddling a tyre. I stood, mesmerised. My mother! Was it possible? Though I had known from Otto's occasional communications that she was working with him, I had pictured the job as something entirely genteel – a little light file indexing that Otto had charitably handed her to keep her occupied; something she might mention to her friends with a glint of irony calculated to express her indomitable spirit in the face of renewed adversity, but certainly nothing harsh enough to account for this apparently wholesale stepping out of character.

‘Hand brake slipping,' she said in a croaky voice. ‘Power steering broken . . .'

Cradling the phone between her head and shoulder, she typed away with what seemed to me an almost ostentatiously ignoble proficiency. It struck me that she must have wanted me to come upon her like this:
in situ
, soldiering on. Even so, the sight of her in this new incarnation – unprepared as I was by any of the tentative preliminaries that had paved the way towards her earlier transformations – was a shock.

She got off the phone, gave me a brisk, jangling embrace, and at once began talking to Otto about the need to raise prices and increase inventory.
Be advised that we are now members of the mercantile class
, her demeanour seemed intended to convey,
and we don't have the luxury, unlike some people, to think about anything but the immediate material necessities of life
.

Was her briskness an inverted sentimentality? I looked for some sign that being together in the flesh again after all these years was as great an upheaval for her as it was for me, but
if it was, she managed to conceal it, and I retaliated with a briskness of my own.

The funeral was brief and low-key, though better attended than I had expected. During the silence in which the coffin was trundled off on its rollers, I heard a strange, raucous sob from the back of the room. Glancing around, I saw a man with tears streaming down his face. A woman beside him began dabbing his cheeks with a handkerchief and patting his hand. It took me a moment to realise that the man was my Uncle Heinrich, and the woman Kitty!

‘At least we were able to do that for her,' my mother commented afterwards, as we hurried through the rain to Otto's car. ‘Get the social services to pay her to look after him. And to give her credit, she's very patient with him. He's become extremely emotional, as you could see. Not that he would have had a clue who he was weeping for – he just picks up on the atmosphere. Kitty's the only person he recognises now. Everyone else is a stranger he thinks he has to charm each time he meets them. You'll see for yourself, no doubt.'

We drove to Otto's apartment. Kitty arrived with Heinrich soon after us. She threw her arms around me. ‘Stefan! I'm so happy to see you!' She had changed remarkably little: same lively grey eyes, same unaffected warmth in their expression. She had qualified as a nurse specialising in care of the elderly, she told me. She was married, to a nightclub manager. They had a boy aged ten. As we talked, the simple creaturely ease of our brief fling came back to me on a warm current of remembrance. I had no wish to rekindle things between us, and nor, I am sure, did she, but I felt an immense gladness that such an interlude had been permitted to occur in my life. Beside her my uncle hung awkwardly, an uncertain smile
on his face. Physically he looked in excellent shape: trim and spruce, good colour, his brown three-piece suit as well-fitting on him as the bark of a healthy tree. It was hard to believe there could be anything wrong with him. ‘Hello,' I said, offering my hand. He took it, tilting his head questioningly. ‘I'm Stefan Vogel,' I told him. He gave a little gallant bow: ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance. Isn't this a jolly occasion? Are you a frequent habitué?' I did my best to conduct a conversation with him, aware that for all my belief in his fundamental decency I bore him a great deal of ill will, and that his condition, far from diminishing this, was adding to it a layer of resentment for the fact that he had apparently succeeded in putting himself beyond all possible reckoning. After a few pleasantries had passed between us, a vacant look appeared on his face. He drew close to Kitty, standing behind her for the rest of the reception like a child cowering behind a parent, examining the contents of his pockets and from time to time glancing out at me mistrustfully.

The caller Otto had mentioned was waiting for me in the lobby of my hotel when I arrived there that evening, her slight frame bundled in a wet brown parka. A smirk crinkled her face as she caught my look of dismayed recognition. Margarete Menzer.

‘There you are. Good. I heard about your father. Condolences. Do you have time for a drink?'

I couldn't think of an excuse, and lacked the bluntness to turn her down without one.

‘All right,' I heard myself say.

We went into the hotel bar, a twilit place done up in sheet metal and rawhide, with a young crowd talking in loud voices over the pulsing beat of a synthetic drum.

‘Chic hotel,' she said, grinning at a party of men with
shaved heads and elaborate underlip topiary. ‘You must be selling lots of poems!'

‘It's the cheapest place I could find.'

‘You mean with gold taps and a private sauna!'

We found a dark nook and ordered drinks. She drank quickly: white wine, then vodka. Her hair, more frizzy now than curly, was tinged with grey; a mass of little iron springs. Her eyes, though, darting to and fro like a bird's above her sharp nose and chin, were black and shiny as ever. As they flickered over me, I felt the reassertion of the proprietorial interest she had taken in me from the start; the claim she had seemed to stake in me, as if recognising a member of her own species. ‘It's good to see you again, Stefan,' she said, patting me lightly on the knee. ‘I couldn't resist the chance of catching up when I found out you were coming over. I hope you don't mind?' I shook my head, wanting only to get this over with as quickly as possible. She had become a journalist, she told me, a freelancer for an Internet publication. ‘Very cutting-edge,' she said with a grin, by which I took her to mean that she had found her way back into her old element of rumour and innuendo. She was single, she declared suddenly, with the overemphatic candour of someone who has consciously disinhibited herself. She took off her parka, revealing a surprisingly flimsy lace blouse. In it, the Margarete of my no doubt feverishly suspicious imagination was briefly supplanted by a possibly more objective Margarete: human, lonely, trying to look her best. A vodka or two later, she was asking if the bedrooms here were as funkily decorated as this bar. Was I tempted to offer to show her? Only out of a certain morbid curiosity; to find out what it would be like to occupy the blackest end of the spectrum of my possible selves. I resisted: ‘No. They're very boring.' She chuckled. ‘Still happily
married?' ‘Extremely.' ‘How nice.' Far from driving her off, my coldness seemed to cement her presence. She ordered more drinks, unpacked cigarettes from her purse and sank back into her seat with a contented look, as if we had just agreed to make a night of drinking and gossip.