Seven Lies (8 page)

I nodded, and he, rousing himself from his chair, his hand still gripping mine, said, ‘Come on, then,' and as if we had long ago agreed to this contingency, we went down together to the storage area, locking the door behind us.

*

I
HAVE
little graphic recollection of what I or Brandt actually did that afternoon or the afternoons that followed at monthly intervals. What survives in me more vividly than the physical details was the sense, already familiar to me at that age, that the harm being done to me had in some mysterious fashion already been done.
It had already happened
. Not literally, perhaps, but in a manner that made this manifestation of it little more than a kind of hieroglyphic record of an earlier, vaster event, as, say, a particular rock formation, made visible by a mudslide, records a seismic upheaval that took place in the earth's tectonic plates aeons ago. If there was any element of surprise, it was simply in the discovery that my blightedness was not by some miracle going to turn out to exclude this particular area of my being. But then I had had no reason to suppose that it would.

The other thing I remember is that Brandt never seemed to experience anything resembling pleasure during our encounters. The vacant look on his large, round face (the face of a baby left to bloat in a jar of formaldehyde) would turn actively gloomy when I arrived at his booth for the key now. As we walked in silence down the service stairway, I had the sense that he was moving there through the same miasma of dimly apprehended horror as I was, and as we groped and grappled lugubriously together in the near-blackness of the storage room, a pair of lobsters in a murky tank, he had the weary air of someone undergoing a peculiarly burdensome penance. I think of the paintings of Bosch – the demons as tormented-looking as their victims, the two at times barely distinguishable as they reach down into each other with the blunt instrument of themselves, entering and breaking. When it was over he would leave me to the privacy of my mother's trunk, limping off in a private cloud of muttered imprecations
directed as much at the world in general as at me personally.

This state of affairs continued for perhaps a year. I was aware that it was unhealthy, to say the least, but at the same time it seemed inconceivable that it could be otherwise. It had come about by a process of invincible logic, one that I myself was complicit in, even if I hadn't initiated it, and for all its unwholesomeness, I recognised in its textures, its particular twists and turns, something that felt peculiarly
me
-like. I had created this strange, convoluted existence, as a sea creature creates the shell peculiar to itself. The distinguishing feature of this particular shell – to pursue the analogy – turned out to be its steady strangulation of its inhabitant. By the time I was freed from it, I was more dead than alive.

Already largely absent from us in spirit, my father began to absent himself physically at this time. He let it be known at work that he was available for the least desired assignments, and began spending weeks at a time at convocations of minor functionaries in Sofia and Bucharest. My mother appeared not to notice, or at least not to mind, continuing indefatigably along the path she had chosen for herself. And then one day, when my father was away on one of his trips, she announced to us over dinner that he would not be coming back to live with us. He had fallen in love with another woman, she informed us drily, a colleague in his department. When he returned to Berlin he and my mother would be divorced, she told us, and he would be moving in with his colleague.

None of us had had any inkling of this, and we pressed my mother for more details, but she appeared to have taken the position that the event was nothing more than a minor annoyance, and the less said about it the better. Unsentimentality over matters of the heart was a point of pride among the educated classes in the former GDR, and my mother's behaviour was doubtless an attempt to prove herself a superior adherent to this code. It must have cost her something, though: when Kitty suddenly burst into tears at
the table, my mother told her extremely sharply to stop. There was a moment's silence. Then her own eyes – to her apparent astonishment – filled with tears (the first and last time any of us beheld such a phenomenon), and she abruptly left the room. A stoical dryness was soon restored, however, and after that she contrived to give a characteristically lofty appearance of being above such commonplace emotions as wounded pride, petty vengefulness, or plain sorrow.

For the most part life continued unaltered after my father's departure, but there was one significant change. Although she may have considered it beneath her to display any personal response to the event, my mother seemed to feel that some kind of ‘official' response was called for, just as a government is sometimes obliged to respond to some event its individual ministers are personally indifferent to, for the sake of the public's sense of balance. The response she settled on was a temporary suspension of her soirées. In this, as in all matters, there was no doubt a strategic motive: namely that their resumption, whenever it came, would be seen as a triumph over adversity. But whatever the case, I was abruptly liberated from my treadmill. No more fraught recitals, no more forgery, no more furtive dalliances with Brandt in the dark basement with its little mice and moths and beetles writhing and blinking on their glue traps all around us.

Suddenly, effortlessly, it was over. Almost too effortlessly, perhaps. With the feeling of a prisoner let out of his dungeon only to be told that the door had never in fact been locked, I drifted back up to the surface of my life, utterly bewildered.

Here, I discovered, things had been proceeding in quite momentous ways, apparently without need of my active participation. At school in particular, where I had been coasting
for some time in a state of almost narcoleptic dreaminess, my life really did seem to have taken on a life of its own.

Ours was one of the elite high schools of Berlin, reserved for children of party officials. We had the best technical and athletic equipment, as well as the most highly qualified teachers, at our disposal, and it was expected that we would follow in the footsteps of our devout, industrious parents. Foreign and domestic dignitaries were constantly being wheeled into our morning assembly to impress on us the heroic nature of our destiny. Abrassimov, the Soviet ambassador, pinned Red Star badges on our chests one morning, carrying himself with the fantastical frostiness he was famous for, and that he evidently thought appropriate to his viceregal status in our republic. Alexander Schalck-Golodowski came to talk to us about so-called ‘German–German' relations. Erich Mielke, Politburo Member for Security, led us in our Pioneer Greeting one morning, before going on to address us on the joys of a career in counterintelligence. Guenter Mittag came to us from Economic Affairs . . . Illustrious names once; names to conjure with, their mere utterance sufficient to induce that sensation of awe reserved for remote, solemn powers – all gone now, disgraced, ridiculed, forgotten.

My mother's visit to my class at the time of our abortive move to New York turned out to have had one lasting effect: it had seriously compromised my position among my classmates. Although I hadn't been actively shunned, I had been put into a kind of social quarantine, a limbo-like condition where I was under close scrutiny pending the appearance of further symptoms that would indicate a full-blown case of unpopularity.

Unpopularity, as any schoolchild knows, is a highly specific spiritual sickness which can strike almost anybody at any given
moment. It is as irrefutably real as the measles, and in its own way almost as contagious. Once a person has been diagnosed with it there is nothing he can do except wait patiently for it to run its course. Attempts to deny it or overcome it by ingratiating oneself with the uncontaminated will only result in ever crueller forms of rejection.

My fall from grace came about almost casually. One afternoon in summer, during our annual Hans Beimler athletic and paramilitary contests, I saw a group of my classmates sitting together on the grass of one of the playing fields. I had just won my quarterfinal in the two-hundred-metre dash, qualifying me for the next round, and I was feeling buoyant enough to join the group without being invited. They had been laughing, but by the time I joined them they had fallen quiet.

‘Let's try it on Stefan,' somebody said. They had evidently been playing some game. I looked about cheerfully, always ready to offer myself as a source of entertainment.

A girl called Katje Boeden spoke. Katje was the daughter of a high-ranking official in Hermann Axen's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I had a private connection to her. A short time before my father's debacle in New York, her family had made a friendly overture to mine, and we had visited them at their house in the Wandlitz compound outside the city. It was a warm home, full of games and toys, and decorated with tribal art from Zanzibar, which gave it an almost bohemian flavour. Katje had been wearing a smocked green dress. On her blossoming body it had seemed to gather up all the innocent wonder of childhood and draw it surreptitiously into a strange new context – that of imminent sexual awakening. The effect on me had been powerful. While Otto went off with her older brother Paul, she took me into the garden where
she had a tree house in a half-dead beech tree. We sat talking for what seemed hours – about what, I have no recollection, but I was bewitched by her. Unfortunately, my father lost his job soon after, and our visit was neither returned nor repeated.

Over the next two or three years, Katje had grown extremely pretty – petite, with sharp, delicate features, sparkling blue eyes and fair hair which she wore in a tight, gleaming crown of braids. Though she never made any reference to our meeting at her home, she was always friendly towards me.

‘Name the first three animals to come into your head, Stefan,' she said.

I forget the first two animals I named, but the third was the three-toed sloth. After a pause there was a titter of laughter: gentle enough at first. Conscious of being a good sport, I sat with my smile, waiting for an explanation. But as the merriment seemed about to subside, a peal of louder, more fulsome and somehow more ominous-sounding laughter broke from Katje. For several seconds it sounded out alone; clear and pure, like the clarion call announcing the arrival of a new force into the field. Then one by one the others joined in, and suddenly they were all doubled up with the kind of wild, hysterical, self-perpetuating laughter that teenagers everywhere so enjoy being overcome by. I continued smiling, telling myself there was nothing to be dismayed about, and yet feeling a faint ache in my throat, and sensing, distantly, the advent of something momentous and catastrophic.

‘The first animal is how you see yourself,' a boy told me when the group had begun to calm down, ‘the second is how others see you. And the third is what you really are.'

‘A three-toed sloth,' Katje shrieked, and once again they were shaking their sides and rolling on the grass, helpless with laughter.

A day or two later, during a geography class, where we were giving presentations on the tropical zone, a boy stood up and announced with a sly grin that he was going to talk about the three-toed sloth. I would say that my heart sank, except that ‘sank' implies a depth of plummeting that wasn't quite what I experienced. Rather, my heart slid down a little, then seemed to move more in a sideways direction, so that as I heard the boy inform us that a sloth stays so still that mould grows in its hair, that its maximum speed – that of a mother sloth hurrying to protect her child – is five metres per hour, that they aren't hunted because even when shot dead they continue clinging to their branch, not dropping until they reach an advanced state of decomposition, and so on, while smiles danced about the room like little sunbeams, what I felt was not some ever-blackening descent into misery, but more a kind of anaesthetising removal, as if I were travelling out beyond the walls and windows towards some point of absolute detachment and indifference. I saw that I had fallen from favour, and I accepted this without protest – inward or outward. After all, I told myself, feeling my familiar sense of
déjà vu
, this had
already happened
. It had happened long ago: what had just occurred was no more than a case of fallible human judgement belatedly recognising the verdict handed down against me long ago by some impassive agency of reality itself.

The last athletic qualifying rounds were held on a sweltering, overcast afternoon. The acrid smell from the chimneys of the nearby foundries and breweries was particularly heavy in the air. I sat on a bench alone, waiting for the semifinals of the two hundred metres. Though I wasn't what you would call an athlete, I had always been able to cover short distances at above-average speed. I relate this faculty directly
to my ability to think up ingenious falsehoods at short notice. Both have to do with the instinct for evasion, which has always been more highly developed in me than that of confrontation. As I sat on the bench I fantasised about winning my round and then going on to win the final itself the following week. In my vision, my face remained stern as I crossed the finishing line, as though to convey that I scorned any hope that this victory might alter my status as an outcast. But as I left the field I would catch Katje's eye, and although she would say nothing, the brief stalling of her attention would tell me that a secret connection had been opened up, linking her in her realm of light to me in my darkness.

In reality what happened was this: As soon as the starter pistol was fired and I leaped forward with my rivals, I became aware of something that at first presented itself as a kind of abstract sense of obstruction. Normally when I ran this race I would have the pleasurable sensation that it was somehow tailor-made for my own particular combination of skills, stamina and ambitions. But now I felt unexpectedly at sea. My body didn't seem to know what to do. Instead of obediently turning itself into an instrument for the expression of speed, it seemed to want to express some new idea of doubt or faltering. I felt that I wasn't so much running as flailing. After a moment I realised that among the shouts coming from the spectators lining the track were cries of unmistakably hostile intent. ‘Five metres per hour,' I heard, ‘There's mould growing on your fur,' and ‘You're decomposing, Vogel.' It was these cries that were thickening the air about me. If ever I wanted proof of the communist idea of the individual as a social unit, even to his physiological functions, I had it here: the sense of my comrades actively willing me not to win the race was indeed slowing me down, their words dragging on
my limbs like lead weights. I caught sight of Katje up ahead of me, thronged by her companions. As I drew level with her, I heard her cry out, her delicate-featured head tilted back in an attitude of ecstatic contempt, ‘Here comes the three-toed sloth.' The space about me felt almost viscous, the sour-ochre smell of burnt malt and coal dust mingling and merging with the hatred radiating towards me, each somehow amplifying the other, until I felt suffocated and nauseous. As I moved slowly across the finishing line, several metres behind the slowest of my rivals, I found myself panting for air and strangely dizzy. Suddenly the ground swung up towards my face and I blacked out.