Seven Lies (17 page)

‘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 . . .

‘Will you think about it, Inge?'

‘OK.'

‘Do you promise me?'

‘Yes, Stefan. I promise.'

Insidious way in which the habits of one's life reassert themselves – even just the habit of pottering about, not thinking or feeling anything very much at all.

I pay bills, I make my online trades (I shorted Intel again – made almost two thousand dollars), I walk Lena, I've even been splitting and stacking firewood for winter . . .

Meanwhile, I think less and less about my drenching at Gloria's party, and when I do, I find myself wondering if I wasn't making altogether too much of it in the first place. It begins to seem almost possible my assailant was just some unhinged or drunk woman who happened to overhear Gloria introducing me to Harold Gedney, and attacked me for no better reason than that she objected to my name or didn't like my face. I can believe that one's deeds leave their signature in one's outward appearance; that for those with eyes to see such things, a person's more significant actions may be legible in the cast of their features or some cryptic singularity in their gait. In other words, that the woman's violence was motivated by an act of impersonal clairvoyance rather than any actual connection to my own past.

At any rate, with every day that goes by I feel less impetus to rock the becalmed boat of my existence, let alone outright incriminate myself.

Logically, I should therefore abandon this memoir. What purpose in an incomplete account of things; a promise of disclosure that turns out to be an act of concealment?

And yet, having come this far, I find myself just as reluctant to stop as to go on. It may be that this is nothing more than the same condition of inertia that afflicted me during my adolescence: one of those ‘Dragons of Stability' stationed at the valve of memory, ensuring that any attempt to close it will require more effort and decisiveness than leaving it open. Possibly; but I sense something else too: some fractionally more positive, or at least aesthetically compelling, reason for continuing, having to do with a suspicion that our arrival in America sixteen years ago may in fact be more accurately evoked with the veil still drawn over the events immediately preceding it than otherwise.

That, after all, was how I experienced those first years: as a time of total division from the past. Hadn't we come to the New World in order to build new lives for ourselves? Were we not entitled – even by a certain logic
required
– to leave all the fault and failure of our old lives behind us? What had happened in our prior lives no longer concerned us, I told myself. It was henceforth eternally sealed off from the present, just as the place in which it had occurred was sealed off eternally (so I believed) from the place we were in now. And in fact I pictured the mental barrier I had constructed between present and past as a wall just as solid and impregnable as the physical wall running through my home city.

I remember those first months of ours here in the States as a period of unbridled revelation and joy. I was like a tropical plant kept for years in a cold climate, then transported to its ancestral soil and suddenly budding with unexpected new life. From the moment we drove in from the airport and
took possession of our fifth-floor apartment (tiny and bare but looking out on the vivid bustle of the East Village), I felt things stirring in me: new powers, new facets of spirit, heart, appetite . . . I was freed, awakened; I felt at the threshold of a most sunlit existence.

It was 1986: another era, it seems now; its ruling principle that of contrast: violent, abrupt and shameless. One moment we were turning out the lights in the church-run homeless shelter below us, with its single grimy sink for all twelve inhabitants; the next we were arriving at one of Gloria Danilov's parties with their caviar wagons and salvers of pink smoked salmon.

Both sides of the picture fascinated me: the ruin and the glamour. I came at them with an undiscriminating hunger that each aspect seemed to satisfy equally. I liked the grime and the grunge, the filthy subway cars lurching by in a fluorescent lichen of graffiti, the street-cleaning vehicles whirling their medieval-looking brooms over the crack vials and sodden porn mags of the East Village gutters. These things had a power about them despite their ungainliness; a lumbering industrial potency that their equivalents in the GDR had never possessed in my eyes. It was just an orientation in the direction of purpose, I suppose, but even that was new to me; the reverse of the machines I had used during my stint in the Construction Brigade, where a comprehensive cynicism was detectable in every malfunctioning switch and lever. I felt immediate affection for the starkly elemental street furnishings: the trash baskets, meters, hydrants, all cast in the same lava-grey substance that looked like metal regressing to its stone ore. The tenements opposite us with their pirate-ship riggings of fire escapes, their water silos bristling like fat, primeval rockets, had a fantastical grandeur in my eyes, as
did the empty lots in their chain link and razor wire, where spindly ailanthus trees grew out of the enormous mounds of garbage. And though it frightened me, the darkness of the project blocks by the East River, where the street lamps had broken and violence seemed electrically imminent as you walked by, filled me with admiration too. To be truthful, my enthusiasm embraced even the human wreckage – the junkies down at the needle exchange office on the first floor of our building; the crack-addicted, AIDS-ravaged figures panhandling in Tompkins Square or curled up on the streets in cardboard boxes; the sidewalk vendors laying out their pitiful bric-a-brac of toothless combs and empty cotton reels . . . All of these sights, which soon began to appal Inge, had an exhilarating effect on me. They seemed to raise the stakes of my own existence; enlarge my sense of what it was to be alive on this earth. I felt wrenched out of the confines of the world I had grown up in, where the spectrum of available experience corresponded so suffocatingly to the tiny size of the country itself. As the old joke there went, a husband suggests to his wife that they spend their vacation taking a tour of the entire GDR. ‘Oh, yeah?' says the wife. ‘What are we going to do in the afternoon?'