The Valley of Unknowing (33 page)

57

Everything was different. Everything was the same. On what turned out to be Christmas Eve, I returned to the valley, without my vodka and my English raincoat, but in all other respects unharmed. I went back to my old apartment with its futile camouflage of tinsel and lights. I went back to my old routines and my old horizons, to a life I thought I had left behind for ever. If the events of the preceding year could have been torn up and thrown away, like an unrewarding storyline, it might have been easy to carry on. By objective standards my life was not so terrible, or so lonely. But this particular narrative had been written in stone. I could not erase or redraft it, or tack on a happy ending; and the weight of it bore down on me, sapping my strength and my will, diminishing the significance of the present. It is a dangerous thing to put your happiness at the mercy of external events, but that was what I had done – a fact I saw plainly as I stepped off the train, still wearing my Western garb, by now grimy and rank. On the platform before me I had once spent a whole day waiting for Theresa’s return, clutching a wilting bunch of chrysanthemums – a wasted day, a day without value. It was days such as this that now lay ahead of me in an endless procession.

This was not quite the ending to the story that I had expected and which, I’d come to believe, justice demanded. Mine was supposed to be a story of sin and redemption in the best Western traditions. I had sinned against Wolfgang Richter, delivering him carelessly into the hands of his enemies. The path to forgiveness and inner peace was one requiring bravery and sacrifice – the redemptive arc, incarnate. The material goal was to expose the truth of Richter’s death and the lies told to hide it. Object achieved, arc completed, the pot of gold awaiting me at the end of my journey should have been Theresa’s love, love which I was worthy of at last. It hadn’t turned out that way. Instead of love I’d been met with betrayal – and not even betrayal as retribution, as a deliberate act of revenge. My betrayal had no significance outside itself, outside Theresa’s preference for her new incarnation and my inability to see it. The redemptive arc did not exist. At best, it dangled uselessly in space, like a bridge that ends midstream. The only thing left to do was get off.

For a long time I heard nothing more from my one-time lover, either through conventional means or via the covert delivery network she had used in the past. (It was possible the authorities were confiscating her letters and blocking her phone calls, but I saw no particular reason why they should go to the trouble.) She did not return to her studies in East Berlin – enquiries at her previous lodgings established that. As far as I was aware, she never attempted to cross the inner German border again. It was possible she assumed I was in prison and didn’t try to contact me for that reason. More likely, I thought, she couldn’t face the prospect of maintaining the lover’s charade: of feigning concern and disappointment and continued devotion. That would have been too much pretence, even for her. Instead, she had left me to draw my own conclusions, knowing that for as long as the death strip remained in place I would never have the opportunity to act on them. Even the authorities in the East were in no position to point the finger. How could they support a claim that she had not written
Survivors
? They had no proof, no material evidence whatsoever. In any case, to make trouble would only draw international attention to its real author (in her eyes myself) and his motives for seeking to publish abroad.

For Theresa, the one inconvenience in our changed circumstances was that she would not now have the sequel I had promised her and which she had promised the world. But hadn’t the profile in
Stern
revealed that she was backing away from that idea already? Besides, was that really a problem now that Martin Klaus was in on the game (perhaps he had been in on it from the beginning)? A sequel, after all, is a mere extrapolation; the characters, the setting, the style, all these were already in place. She and Klaus could write it together, working as a team. And if that didn’t work, they could always call in a ghost, some bright young wordsmith in need of money.

Did all this lead me to hate her? Did I rage at the injustice of my betrayal? Was my head filled with thoughts of revenge? The answer to these questions is no. I did hate her periodically in the months that followed my arrest. I burned her photographs, while mentally rehearsing a variety of exotic counter-strikes, usually involving an ambush at a public event, the vanquished Krug appearing before the literary usurper like Banquo’s ghost. It pleased me to imagine her tortured by conscience and the inescapable knowledge of her own selfishness, but these indignant fits soon gave way to simple regret. I still loved her, you see. To be more precise, I loved the Theresa Aden I had known in the first months of our affair, the viola player with the shy smile and the tangled hair; the diffident, clever girl who so clearly didn’t know what to ask of life, or what to take; the girl who was, above all, afraid to shine. And if that particular lover had been a dream, a fantasy corresponding to my desires and my tastes, it was a fantasy I had hastened to an unnecessary end with my scheming. For who but me had given birth to Eva Aden, literary sensation? The old Theresa might have lived on if I had only let events take their natural course, instead of trying to prolong an affair whose season could not have been other than brief.

As for the cash – the Deutschmarks and dollars accumulating, I assumed, in Switzerland – I wasn’t sorry to find it beyond my reach. Perhaps this is hard to believe (scrupulous honesty, I have observed, is common when it comes to small sums, but much rarer when it comes to large ones), but as far as I was concerned it was blood money. Knowing what I knew about its origins, I couldn’t have spent a pfennig of it without deepening my complicity in Wolfgang Richter’s fate. His mother and father were entitled to profit from the success of
Survivors
, if anyone was. In ideal circumstances the money would have gone to them. Still, my regrets over that were tempered by the undeniable fact that their son had planned to abandon them, most likely without saying goodbye. Was this proof of indifference? Certainly not. But neither did it suggest devotion.

In the interests of thoroughness I should record that I saw them once again, that sad old couple, in the grounds of the Tolkewitz Crematorium, where I occasionally strayed on my way across the river. Since the funeral a small stone plaque had been laid in the shadow of a yew tree bearing Wolfgang’s name, beneath which lay his ashes. It was an awkward encounter, a dank and windy day in late March. Herr Richter, I am sure, saw me from a distance. He took his wife by the shoulders and tried to steer her away so that we should not have to talk. But then she too saw me and could not be prevented from raising a hand in greeting. A stilted conversation followed, one which I found intensely uncomfortable, though the promised
Eingabe
was never mentioned (for fear, no doubt, of embarrassing me). As I was about to take my leave, Frau Richter took me by the arm and asked if I remembered ‘that girl’ Wolfgang had been seeing before he died.

‘Would you believe, she’s famous now? In the West. For writing books.’

I expressed surprise, wondered if there could already be more than one book in the Aden canon.

‘Now I know what she was up to,’ Frau Richter added. ‘She was picking our Wolfgang’s brains.’

I agreed with her that this was very possible, at which she began quite suddenly to cry.

I didn’t go back to the crematorium after that.

I got into the habit of drinking a good deal during those two years. If I avoided clinical alcoholism, it was not because alcoholism did not officially exist in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State; it was thanks to my weakened stomach, which had the habit of becoming irritated when pickled. All the same, I worked on the latest instalment of the
Factory Gate Fables
in a haze of misanthropic inebriation. Under this new influence the fable turned slowly and irresistibly into a farce. I broke with tradition and relocated the action to a collective farm. A bookish newcomer from the city attempts to seduce a sturdy peasant girl with another man’s love poetry passed off as his own. At a certain point in the action chickens escape on to the roof. (I
wanted
people to be reminded of
Two on a Bicycle
. In a small, sly way I thought it might help to keep the memory of my protégé alive.) In the end the peasant girl makes a fool of her pseudo-poetical suitor, leaving him penniless and suicidal.

Michael Schilling, with unusual directness, told me the story lacked warmth. None of the characters was likeable: the lover arrogant and dishonest, the object of his attentions shallow and grasping. More importantly, it showed the agricultural proletariat in such a bad light that it was unlikely to secure ministerial approval. I had better redraft it, he said, introducing a little more in the way of working-class solidarity, if I didn’t want ‘questions asked’. I laughed when he said this. My whole life, it seemed to me, had been lived out in the shadow of questions; how could a few more make any difference? But since martyrdom was, it seemed, unavailable to me (and pointless in the circumstances), I did as he suggested to the best of my abilities, leaving him to improve on the laboured language and the tortuous tangles of grammar.

Schilling was, of course, the only person who knew of my abortive plan to go West. I had told him long since that I had simply changed my mind, partly in the light of his advice – an explanation he accepted readily and without a hint of criticism. Since then he had never raised the subject again, as if, like his failed marriage, it was something painful, best left alone for both our sakes. I was grateful for his perspicacity.

By chance, the day I finally finished the second draft of my new fable – which is to say the day I could no longer stand to have it in my apartment – turned out to be one of historical significance. I had decided to deliver the manuscript to Schilling’s office in person, not because I was terrified of losing it, but because I was out of liquor and needed to make a trip to the Intershop in any case. My priority being the alcohol, I went to the shop first and it was not until late in the afternoon that I reached Ferdinandsplatz. I hadn’t gone far when I realised that the number of pedestrians passing through the square was greater than usual. Stranger still, they all seemed to be heading in the same direction: when I looked back I saw only their faces; when I looked ahead I saw only the backs of their heads.

Whatever the attraction, it wasn’t located in Ferdinandsplatz. The straggling columns converged on the south-west corner of the square and disappeared down a narrow side street. Curious, infected by the novelty of the spectacle, I followed. Soon I stood at the heart of a monumental modern zone: a showcase of Corbusian tower blocks and concrete plazas. People were spilling into the area from every direction. On Prager Strasse I saw a crowd of thousands gathered outside an international restaurant (hard currency only), but they weren’t after a table. They were just standing around. From further up the street came the sound of singing. I couldn’t make out the tune, though it reminded me of a hymn. I continued walking, almost bumping into a young man with, of all things, an altar candle. He was struggling with a cigarette lighter. ‘Here, hold this, will you?’ he said.

Without thinking, I took the candle, tucking the manuscript under my left arm. The young man lit the wick, cupping his fingers round the flame. It was only then I noticed that most of the crowd were young, like him. In the fading light I searched in vain for grey hair, high foreheads, lined skin, the haggard badges of middle age – feeling suddenly out of place, as if I’d stepped uninvited into a student party. I returned the candle to its owner.

Then the crowd was moving; shuffling forward at first, then picking up the pace, buoyed along by its own momentum. A petite woman in a white ski jacket put her arm through mine, so that my shopping bag of vodka bottles clunked against my thigh as we walked. Everywhere people were linking up, making human chains, adding reinforcement to the mass of flesh and bone, as if anticipating resistance. A banner was unfurled behind me. It read:

ALLE MACHT IN EINER HAND

GEHT BERGAB MIT UNSERM LAND

As slogans went, this was quite poetic: the rhyming, the meter, the use of opposites.
All power in one hand, (means) going downhill with our land
would be an ungainly literal translation. Only after I had finished being impressed by the form did I ingest the content. In whose hands was power in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State? In the Party’s, of course. The Party enjoyed the leading role, by constitutional right – which could only mean one thing: I was participating not in a procession but in a protest. I had never seen a protest before, let alone taken part in one. Under Actually Existing Socialism the right to peaceful protest did not exist. The thrill of sheer novelty and the female arm clamped round mine were all that kept me from taking to my heels right away.

‘Where are we going?’ I had to shout. Around us people were chanting.

‘To the Hauptbahnhof,’ the woman said. I remember clearly her avian delicacy – the pale skin and dark eyes, the slight build. One good blow with a nightstick would have been enough to break her in two.

‘Why the Hauptbahnhof?’

‘The freedom trains,’ she said. ‘From Prague. Didn’t you hear?’

What I hadn’t heard was that thousands of my fellow citizens had crossed the border into the socialist republic of Czechoslovakia, a journey for which no visa was required, and there set up camp in the grounds of the West German embassy. After negotiations between the three relevant governments, they were now being railroaded to the West so as not to spoil the upcoming season of revolutionary anniversaries. The trains, it had been agreed, would pass through the territory of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State on their way, not out of geographical necessity, but so that their passengers could be officially expelled, rather than simply being allowed to escape. A high price had been paid for this political fig leaf: protests and violence had erupted at stations all along the way, where hundreds more of my fellow citizens had tried to break into the carriages.