Seven Lies (5 page)

There was an upright piano in the corner of the living room, and from time to time there would be music at our
gatherings: a solo recital by some budding young pianist, or a trio or quartet if others brought instruments. Given the obdurately stiff, formal, frosty tenor of the conversational part of the soirées, these interludes were a relief to the company and always greatly appreciated. One day a lull descended on the room when there happened to be no musicians present. A writer named Franz Erhardt stepped forward and ‘begged permission' to read us something from his novel, which he had brought with him. Permission was granted, and he began to read.

He was a small, sallow man with a forked beard and light blue eyes that always seemed to be at work on some caustic or double-edged little observation. My mother had found him a job at the state TV company, and he told me once, with a strange sort of rueful sneer, that he occasionally dreamed of her, ‘just as the English dream of their queen'. I understand that he went on to become quite a success in the literary world of the GDR, and that by the time the Wall came down he was a top-ranking bureaucrat in the Writers' Union, with guaranteed sales of a hundred thousand copies of every novel he wrote. A few years ago I read in the
New York Times
that he had hanged himself after his Stasi file had been opened, revealing that he had been an informer for most of his adult life. I remember that the novel he read from that evening was a strange sort of satirical spoof, unusual in those days of solid socialist realism, taking as its premise President Kennedy's famous statement ‘
Ich bin ein Berliner
' and imagining a patrician American with Kennedy's decadent appetites and corrupt ideas getting stuck in East Berlin and suffering a series of instructive mishaps that finally turn him into a good and happy socialist.

Judging from the hearty laughter that filled the room, it
had plenty of funny jokes. I myself was too young to understand them. Besides, I was distracted. There was something about the very fact of this reading – a novelty in our drawing room – that was making me uneasy. I noticed my Uncle Heinrich staring at me pensively once or twice across the room. For some time I had been dimly aware of his interest in me growing more intense, as if my ‘writing' and his own former literary ambitions made us kindred spirits. He would often talk to me about writers he admired, sometimes discussing his own youthful efforts, and telling me how much he looked forward to reading something of mine. For my part the whole subject occupied such a dreamy, subterranean part of my consciousness that I find it almost hard to accuse myself of active hypocrisy in allowing him to continue in his delusions about me.

But as I watched him now, his cropped head with its elegant, gaunt features and silver-grey eyes roving attentively between Erhardt, the enrapt guests and myself, I had a faintly sickening sensation that some hidden and intimate area of myself that I had until now considered inviolably private was about to be forcibly exposed to public view.

Sure enough, as soon as the reading was over and the applause had begun to die down, I heard my uncle's rather high-pitched voice with its clipped enunciation, calling to me from across the room.

‘Stefan, young fellow, what about you? Why don't you read something of yours now?' He was looking at me with a kindly expression – there was always something very proper and clean and good-natured about him;
merry
, one might almost say – but at that moment his smiling face seemed to me full of menace and barely concealed cruelty. I remember observing the same dignified and innocent expression of warmth on his
face and feeling the same chilled response in my own heart many years later, when I was brought to him in his comfortable rooms at the Office of the Chief of the People's Police, where once again I found myself at a loss to circumvent some request that from his point of view was wholly reasonable, while to me it seemed to stretch the already abused fabric of my soul to the point of ripping it altogether in two.

His suggestion was immediately taken up by the other guests.

‘Yes, what a good idea,' a voice cried out. ‘Frau Vogel, ask your son to read us one of his compositions.'

‘I – I don't have anything prepared,' I stammered. But my apparent modesty merely fanned the flames of their interest, and I soon found myself at the centre of a chorus of bantering remarks about my shyness and lack of spontaneity. ‘Come on, Stefan, read us something from this great work we've been hearing so much about,' someone called, while another, to my mortification, said, ‘Otto, fetch your brother's poems. He's too modest to get them himself.'

Otto turned to this speaker with the look of surly impassiveness that he had been perfecting over the past year. He too had been a target for my mother's ‘artistic' reinvention of our family. Since he had always been good with his hands, he was chosen to represent the pictorial muse. He had been sent to drawing classes and presented with a box of high-grade French charcoals and some handmade paper sketchbooks finagled by my mother through our surviving connections in the higher levels of the
privilegentsia
. After the first few classes he had abruptly refused to attend any more. My mother tried to change his mind, but he stood his ground. Even when she rather unsubtly attempted to pander to his burgeoning interest in girls by offering to find him a class
with live nude models, he resisted. And when finally she threatened to punish him if he didn't keep at it, he broke the charcoals, ripped the sketchbooks to pieces and exploded at her with such savage virulence that she – even she – had been forced to back down. Otto now occupied an anomalous, private, decultured zone within the family: tolerated, but not much more.

I'm not sure whether I simply lacked his courage to be himself, or whether I had allowed myself to become tainted by the thought that I might actually be that potent and glamorous thing, an artist. Perhaps, despite my shyness and horror of exposure, I secretly craved the kind of attention that had just been lavished on Franz Erhardt. Instead of coming out and confessing that I didn't in fact have anything to read to the assembled company, I merely stood there, inwardly writhing, unable to speak, while the guests continued baying at me from all corners of the room.

It was my father, to my surprise, who saved me, though it would certainly have been better for me in the long run if he hadn't.

‘Perhaps next time, Stefan, eh?' he said quietly. ‘That way you'll have time to prepare something for us.'

It was so rare for him to assert himself in any way at these gatherings that I think people in their uncertainty attributed more authority to him than he actually possessed. He was deferred to: the baying stopped, and with a few waggings of fingers and stern warnings not to forget, I was given a month's reprieve.

A
S THE DAYS
passed, the question of how I was going to acquit myself at the next soirée grew rapidly from a faint unease to
a consuming preoccupation that soon formed the single focus of my life. Theoretically it still would have been possible to own up to my lack of material and back down, but as I have often felt when faced with a choice between a healthy and a harmful course of action, I had the distinct sensation of the harm
having already been done
, without my conscious consent or even participation, so that the apparent choice was in fact no choice at all. At any rate, the thought of making a clean breast of things, disgracing myself before my mother and looking foolish in front of her friends barely crossed my mind. With the same odd mixture of submissiveness and furtive ambition, I lay awake at nights, next to my sleeping brother, racking my brains for a solution. I had tried the most rational thing: to sit down and write. But it had become painfully clear to me that whatever faculties of imagination and verbal ingenuity were required to bring something even remotely coherent, let alone interesting, into existence on a blank page, I was entirely devoid of them. The feeling I'd had as I sat at my table trying to coax words out of myself was more than simply one of impotence; it was a kind of vast, inverted potency: the sheer inert mass of blankness that I had attempted to breach reverberating violently back through me, as though I had tried to smash through a steel door with my fist. I soon gave up.

It was on a morning a few days before the soirée that my anxiety, roused by now to a condition in which it actually functioned as a kind of substitute imagination, formed the first in what turned out to be a long series of dubious solutions, each of which immediately raised new and more serious problems.

As Kitty opened the larder in search of some jam for my mother's toast, I happened to glimpse the double row of
aquavit bottles at the back of the top shelf. Unreplenishable since my father's fall from grace, these had now acquired the value of precious heirlooms, and my parents were extremely sparing in their use of them as bribes. From the sight of these bottles, my mind turned to Herr Brandt, and from him to the last expedition Otto and I had made to the basement, in search of the von Riesen linen. And suddenly I remembered those leather-bound volumes of
World Poetry in Translation
.

That afternoon, during the quiet hour after my return from school, when my parents were both out and Kitty was in her room enjoying a moment of leisure before preparing our dinner, I stole one of the little frosted-glass bottles from the larder and went downstairs to ask Brandt for the key to the storage room. He stared at me, so long, and with such vacant dullness, that for a moment I wondered if he now considered it so far beneath his dignity to acknowledge me that I had actually become invisible to him. But eventually he gave his weary sigh and got up to accompany me.

Doing my best to imitate my brother's confident, worldly tone, I told him I could manage on my own, if he would just give me the key. I took out the aquavit bottle and nonchalantly offered it to him. ‘Here, this is for you. Compliments of the house.' A glint of something approaching amusement appeared in his eye. My contemptible absurdity had apparently just sunk to new depths of preposterousness. He took the bottle with a disdainful shrug of his heavy, soft shoulders. I waited for him to give me the key, but he merely looked at the bottle, wiping the mist from the frosted glass with the pad of a thumb so fleshy and nail-bitten it looked like one of those pastries where the risen dough all but engulfs the dab of jelly at its centre.

‘Could I have the key, please?' I asked, attempting to control
a faint tremor in my voice. Herr Brandt smiled and raised two obese fingers. ‘
Zwei Flaschen
,' he said, ‘one for privacy, one for the key.' It struck me that the peculiar warped affinity that existed between us had somehow made it apparent to him that I was here on personal rather than family business, and with his lugubrious but unerring instinct for such things, he realised he had found an opportunity for extortion. Aware of my own powerlessness as well as the jeopardy I had placed myself in, I swallowed my protests and went silently back upstairs for a second bottle.

Kitty was now in the kitchen peeling potatoes. It was imperative that I get her out immediately: I sensed that if I were gone longer than a minute or two Brandt would consider himself justified in renegotiating the terms. I could picture exactly the ponderous way he would look at his watch and shrug off any attempt to hold him to his word. As is often the case with me, acute necessity brought forth invention – or at least a short-term expedient. I remembered that Kitty had been unhappy a few weeks ago when some man she had been seeing had suddenly vanished. Tearfully she had admitted to my mother that the man had been a member of a group that met once a week in a church to discuss world peace. Thinking he had been arrested, she had begged my mother to use her influence to help him. My mother had retorted with a stern lecture on the impropriety of a member of our household having anything to do with such a person, and that was the last I had heard of the matter.

‘Jürgen's outside,' I told Kitty. ‘He asked me to come and get you. He's in the alley by the coal-hole. He looks like he's been living rough.'

Gasping, Kitty ran out of the room, her hands still wet from the potatoes. I took the second bottle, rearranging some
canned celery to fill the space at the end of the row, and, with a feeling of venom in my heart, went back downstairs.

This time I was careful not to give Brandt the bottle until I had the key. Even so, he managed to make me jump through one more hoop. Instead of actually handing me the key, he merely pointed to the bunch hanging at his waist and told me to come and unhook it myself. This I did, reluctantly, but feeling that I had no choice. As I fumbled with the key ring, I was unpleasantly aware of his sour smell and the soft paunch of his stomach wobbling against the back of my wrist.

With the key finally in my hand, I went down to the basement. Only one of the two bulbs hanging in the storeroom worked, and the place was gloomier than ever. The trunk's brasswork gleamed faintly among the shadowy bric-a-brac of our cubicle. I opened the lid, releasing the familiar musty odour, and took out the six-volume set of
World Poetry in Translation
. There was no question of bringing these upstairs: even if I had found somewhere to hide them, they would have been discovered. My mother had once discovered a West German comic book under Otto's mattress, and since then she had been in the habit of regularly turning the place upside down. I had brought a pencil and paper with me, my plan being to copy out one of the prose translations down here, and convert it into poetry upstairs. If anyone saw the copied-out translation, I would claim it was ‘notes' for a poem.

With this in mind, I tipped one of the volumes to the light and began looking through it. I was searching for something that conformed in spirit to the quasi-abstract but unequivocally ‘upward-aspiring' tenor of the artworks favoured in our home. I read quickly, aware that the longer I took, the more likely it was that I would have to account for my absence. Many years later, I heard a literature professor on the radio
declare that the only valid criterion for judging a piece of writing was whether it could ‘save your life'. Remembering my feverish ransacking of these volumes in the grainy darkness of the storeroom, I felt that I understood exactly what he was talking about.