The Valley of Unknowing (21 page)

36

It never occurred to me that the birth of Eva Aden, novelist and visionary, was the birth of what Westerners call a ‘brand’. Brands in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State were blotchy trade names, stamped on to canned goods, bottles of alcohol and cameras manufactured for export. Their purpose was identification. They had no value of their own. For the same reason it didn’t occur to me that there might be other parties involved in the shaping of this brand, other voices in Theresa’s ear, instructing her on how to exploit her potential to the full. I was happy to witness the effects of her new-found freedom because I saw myself as its author. Seen in this way, the original deception regarding Richter’s novel, though born out of fear, had worked out far better than I’d planned. Theresa was enjoying herself, finding new confidence, a new voice. Her talent as a musician had been real but inhibited, just as Claudia Witt had said; her talent as a writer was counterfeit, but natural and unconstrained. It was a puzzle, but one I thought I understood. The key to it, I reassured myself, was love.

If I had been cynical by nature, or perhaps familiar with Western ways, I might have worried more about the other side effects of our artistic collaboration: the money, for instance. I felt certain Theresa was not corruptible in that way, though she was susceptible to the occasional item of jewellery, the occasional French dress. Viola-playing was surely not a career of choice for those of a materialistic outlook. And then there was fame: a phenomenon notorious for its narcotic effect, especially on the young and the insecure. It engendered euphoria and, in many cases, the sensation of being loved. It could lead to dependence: fame as fix. Only now and again did I find myself imagining the secret dreams that might now be within Theresa’s reach and asking myself if there was really a place in them for me.

I might not have worried at all if Theresa’s plans had been settled, if the arrangements had been in place for another year of study in Berlin. But they were not in place, though months had gone by since the plan had been hatched. Approvals were awaited, payments were pending. That was all I knew. Was Theresa dragging her feet? Was she having second thoughts? Was it possible there was now someone else in her life?

Eva Aden, novelist and visionary, might not want me, but at least she still needed me. She needed someone, at any rate, capable of writing a sequel to
Survivors
(how I hated – on Richter’s behalf – that popcorn-chasing sell-out of a title) and I was the obvious candidate. One night, lying sleepless in my still solitary bed, suddenly convinced of my imminent abandonment, I decided to remind her of this fact by writing a letter. I did it there and then, longhand. Then I went and posted it, so as to be sure of making the first collection. The relevant paragraph went something like this:

I have been working on the new book. As you know, I hate to discuss my work before it’s finished – I am not too happy discussing it even then – but I cannot stop myself from telling you how well it’s going. For really the first time in my life I feel I have hit my stride. In the past I have often felt I was feeling my way through a fog. That anything clear or cogent came out of it seems miraculous. But now at last I see things clearly. The visions are so sharp they almost hurt, the passions so powerful they make me shake. How can I account for this sudden clarity? Maybe there comes a time in life when the mirror turns, when a writer can see the world other than through the prism of his own ambitions and his own fears. Or maybe I am happy because you are coming back to me. Either way, as long as my mind remains in its present hopeful state, I am certain that the new book will eclipse the last. It is a story of secrets within secrets and lies within lies, a story where the truth is no more than an idea in the mind of a child – but, for all that, a story about love. I feel certain that it will confound the publisher’s expectations. Have a little patience and you will see for yourself.

As soon as I woke the next morning I regretted what I had done. It was madness to raise such extravagant expectations. Worse, I had given way to my suspicions, which were based not on fact but on pessimism and self-doubt. Theresa loved me. If she was putting her heart and soul into the role of Eva Aden, that was for my benefit, not hers. She was doing it for me. My letter would make no difference. It certainly wouldn’t bring her running to my side, like an obedient wolfhound.

Two weeks later I received a reply. In it Theresa told me that everything in Berlin was arranged, the fees paid, the visa granted, and that she had found lodgings with a retired professor and his wife in Prenzlauer Berg. I could expect to see her again before the end of the month.

37

One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death. Having little hope of completing the task I had set myself, having despaired of my powers and my vision, having thought myself to a standstill and walked myself to exhaustion, I sat down to write. It was the only thing left to do.

I wrote many openings, taking the end of
Survivors
as my cue. Some of them were promising, many were bold. For days at a time things went better than expected, better than they had done for years. I began to sense that the clarity I had boasted of in my letter might not be so far away. I do not believe in Muses. Theresa was not my Muse, but she was my spur, she gave me back my appetite. I wanted to succeed for her as much as for myself, our interests being, so I believed, synonymous.

For all these hopeful signs, my openings never coalesced into a story. The snapshots never became a film. The characters were familiar to me, but I struggled to get inside their heads, to do the thinking for them. The reasons for this were clear: Alex, the reluctant warlord, Tilmann his nemesis, Tania his tragic bride, these were no longer my creations. Whatever their origins, they were Wolfgang Richter’s offspring now. They reflected his mind and his imagination – entities I had no desire to reanimate or dwell in. Richter himself had shown me no such consideration when he wrote
The Valley of Unknowing
, but that made no difference. Irrational it may have been, but I wanted to keep out of Richter’s domain the way sane men avoid Ouija boards, from an innate fear of trespass and a respect for the dead. It was to my detriment that I had no choice.

Sequels are supposed to be easy. So much that is in them has been imagined already. The willing readers stand ready. The hard work of seducing them has been done. It should certainly be easier than starting from nothing. But it wasn’t for me. For weeks I slaved and drank, and paced and typed, my head filling up with plot lines and variations on plot lines, the mass of them growing and tangling like brambles in a wet summer, but without the promise of fruit. I went out only when at risk of starvation. I shaved rarely, sleeping only when exhaustion overcame me – at my desk, on the sofa, in the bath – my life resembling that of the archetypal artist more than it had ever done before. What I had to show for it was incipient diarrhoea and a mountain of screwed-up paper large enough to constitute a fire hazard. When Barbara Jaeger telephoned, inviting me to another of her soirées, I told her I thought I was dying and would be unable to attend. She gave me the name of a clinic in the suburb of Radeburg and told me to make an appointment, being sure to mention her name. In the meantime I was expected to attend her event.

‘People say you’ve stopped going out. I hope you’re not becoming a recluse, Bruno. That would be too boring.’

‘I’m working,’ I said, ‘for the first time in years.’

‘A Hero of the People can’t be a recluse. A recluse only thinks of himself.’

‘I’m not a Hero of the People, as you very well know.’

‘An anti-social socialist is a contradiction in terms. Eight o’clock sharp, and whatever you do, don’t
bring
anything.’

I asked her what she meant.

‘That filthy moonshine you’re always handing out. The schnapps or whatever. It’s poisonous and much too powerful.’

Which was pretty much how I felt about Barbara.

That same night I dreamed of the Jaegers’ soirée, the way people often dream about unavoidable engagements in their near future. The dream occasion was unusual only in that it stayed in my mind longer than the real thing. It remains there still.

At the beginning I was standing in a crowd, holding an empty glass. We were not in Barbara’s flat, but in a large civic building, where spherical lights hung down from the ceiling on long wires. Barbara stood by the door, wearing a red cocktail dress and greeting guests as they arrived, throwing back her head as she laughed, exposing her pale throat and the golden fillings in her teeth. Having no one to talk to, I went looking for a refill. As I gently elbowed my way across the room, I became aware of another sound: a relentless, irregular tapping. It was coming from beneath my feet.

The other guests didn’t notice. They were all too busy laughing and smoking American cigarettes. Despairing of refreshment I went in search of cleaner air, making my way out into the voluminous lobby. Absently I brought a hand to my stomach and was horrified to discover I was still wearing my medal. I had been wearing it all evening without knowing it.

I pulled off the medal and stuffed it my pocket, becoming aware once more of the tapping. It was louder, closer; an intermittent, mechanical sound, like Morse code. I followed the sound down a small flight of steps at the bottom of which stood a studded iron door. I looked for a handle, but there wasn’t one. I found only a large vertical slot where a keyhole might have been. I reached into my pockets for coins, but found only my medal. It turned out to be exactly the right fit. I yanked it free of its ribbon and pushed it in. With a gentle click the door unlocked.

There was a long corridor in front of me, with more iron doors on either side, deeply recessed into the walls. There was a strong smell of earth, mingled inexplicably with a sickly aroma of cut flowers. The tapping sound was coming from the far end of the corridor. I knew what it was by this time: somebody was using a typewriter.

The sound of typing led me to a door that was different from the others. I recognised the grain of the wood, the pattern of cracks and flaking varnish: it was the door to my apartment. I understood then, as if it were something obvious that I had merely forgotten, that the corridors beneath the civic building where honours were conferred led beneath the city to the villa in Loschwitz. I peered through the spyhole. I saw the interior of my apartment shrunk to the size of a pea. A light was on in the bedroom, a band of brightness falling across the hallway.

I opened the door with my key. The smell of flowers was stronger on the other side. I tiptoed into the sitting room. My record player was on, the music gloomy and symphonic. I looked around for a weapon, some means of self-defence. What I found was a hammer, lying across the seat of my old leather armchair.

As soon as I saw him, sitting at the desk with his back to me, wearing a black velvet jacket, I knew it was Richter I had been expecting all along. This was because we were not in my bedroom, or my apartment, but in his. A glance around the room confirmed this, even though many of the objects and furnishings were identical to mine. It seemed that I was the intruder in this place and Richter his victim. But what was to be the crime?

I approached carefully. I wanted to turn and run, but I was on a mission and it was too late to turn back. Richter sensed my presence. He stopped typing and sat up, listening, his head turning just enough for me to make out the corner of his eyebrow, the waxy crescent of his cheekbone. The music covered the unsteady sibilance of my breathing and the pounding of my heart. Richter went back to typing, only the typing was different this time: much slower and regular, like the beat of a funeral march. It was, I realised, ironic typing, postmodern typing; typing that is aware of its own artificiality, its own intermediation – in short, typing that was aware of
me
.

I dropped the hammer. It landed on the floor without making a sound. Richter continued to type, faster now, swiping the carriage return lever as the bell sang out the completion of each freshly completed line. How I missed that sound: that clattering, pinging affirmation of fertility and achievement. And how I envied Richter for making it, even though it had cost him his life on earth (we were clearly not on earth now, but in some other world, where machinery and devices were plentiful, but communication was not).

By this time I was standing at his shoulder. I needed to know what he was writing.
That
was my purpose here. I had come as a spy, to discover Richter’s next project, Richter the true author of
Survivors
. Only here, from him, could I find what I needed to satisfy Theresa, to bring her back to the valley and to me. The only unnatural aspect of the mission was that Richter seemed content to collaborate in this second literary theft, to give me at least a glimpse of his intentions; as if I were there at his direction instead of my own. Perhaps, I thought, he had no use for celebrity any more. Perhaps the voice I offered him was better than no voice at all.

I held my breath. My shoe leather creaked as I leaned over him. I could see the type, but my eyes refused to settle on it long enough to read it. They seemed to avoid contact the way one magnet repels another. Just a few sentences might be all I needed. One single line might reveal the nature of the book I was supposed to write. I forced myself to look again, to build the first line one letter at a time. And I saw this:

One November morning, while the schoolchildren outside were going through their gas mask drill, the telephone rang.

I knew what came next: the phone call from Michael Schilling, the
Eiscafé
rendezvous, the handover of a manuscript – a manuscript without an author, without a title, awaiting my appraisal; a story set in the future,
a
future.

The beginning of that story played out in my head and when the memory was over I found that my dream was over too. I was in bed, awake. Richter had disappeared, likewise the scent of dead flowers and the sound of typing. A blind was tapping against the window frame. Around me lay the familiar chaos of my literary false starts, a room full of mutilated and discarded papers, gently shifting in the draught. The sight reminding me with sudden force of petals thrown over a grave, the grave being, of course, my mother’s, since she had never had one, except for those I had provided for her in a thousand fearful imaginings.

It was still dark outside, but I didn’t feel tired. I felt fragile and jumpy, like someone who has narrowly avoided a fatal collision. I climbed out of the bed and wrote down everything that had happened in my dream. By the time I had finished, I knew what it was the spectral Richter wanted me to write: not a sequel to his first novel, of course, but the story of that novel itself, its origins and its fate – which was, in part, my story, since I alone could tell it.

What he wanted, in short, was a confessional work. Creatively speaking, it was the one book I could write; in all other respects it was the one book I couldn’t.

A few days later a letter arrived via Theresa’s underground mail service, containing fifteen reviews of
Survivors
, cut from a variety of German newspapers and magazines. Hastily I skimmed through them, not out of concern with the general verdict (the book under examination was not mine, after all, but that of a man who was safely beyond critical range), but for fear of how the book would be interpreted. All the reviews were positive. Many were effusive. The longer reviews, in the more serious publications, detected weighty feministic themes and subtle intentions in the Aden début, upon which they expounded with miraculous confidence, as if they’d been eavesdropping on her mind. Thankfully none mentioned the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, or made any connection to its history. A couple pointed out in passing that the author had studied music ‘behind the iron curtain’. Nevertheless, for safety’s sake, I destroyed them, all except one, which appeared in a magazine hitherto unknown to me entitled
Die Berliner Literaturkritik
. The salient paragraph went like this:

Perhaps Miss Aden’s greatest skill is in lending a timeless, universal significance to the smallest of human actions and the most private of human desires. It is not merely that we care about her characters and their fates. It is that in their struggles we sense the struggles of history, of whole societies and whole peoples. In this, and in the common themes of renewal, rebirth and betrayal, her work is strongly reminiscent of – perhaps even a subtle hommage to – The Orphans of Neustadt, the 1960s classic by the late Bruno Krug.

My first reaction on seeing myself described in this way (as recently deceased) was one of indignation, tinged, I must admit, with a frisson of doubt. Foolish as it may seem, I did go into the bathroom and look in the mirror and splash water on my face, just to reassure myself. Only when fully satisfied that my existence was still corporeal did I examine the cutting again. This time, instead of indignation, what I felt was a haunting and inexplicable sorrow, as if at the passing of an old friend. The critic had made a factual error (how telling that the editors had failed to spot it). At the same time his manner of describing me was, as far as Bruno Krug the writer was concerned, nothing less than a statement of fact.