The Valley of Unknowing (34 page)

This I learned later. That evening I was clear about only one thing: that we were collectively asking for trouble. In the early history of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State there had been instances of unrest, or so I had heard. They had always ended in bloodshed.

‘What about the police?’ I asked.

‘They can’t arrest us all.’

I wondered if that was true. How many people
could
they arrest? A hundred? A thousand? Where would they put us all?

‘What about the Russians?’

‘Just let them try!’ the bird woman said, throwing back her head.

I hoped they didn’t try. The Russians, I was fairly certain, could roll over anyone or anything if they put their minds to it. Numbers were no impediment. But it wasn’t a vision of tanks or machine guns or tear gas that was responsible for my slipping away. Nor was it my burden of vodka and double-spaced fiction, though my arms were beginning to ache from carrying them. It was not an emotion or a feeling of any kind, but rather the
absence
of a feeling: an absence of belonging. I admired this youthful, defiant crowd. I was astonished by their bravery. I hoped the bird woman was right, that she and the other marchers would get everything they wanted without getting their skulls crushed. But as we walked on together, away from the Altstadt, away from the ruins and the part-ruins and the reconstructed grandeur of a fallen kingdom, towards the central railway station – now a metaphorical gateway to a freshly minted future – I found it impossible to share in that dream. You see, I had already been to that station, to the metaphorical reality as well as the physical one, and it had not delivered on its promises. It had not gifted me a new life. It had only made a wreck of the old one. I found, even on that extraordinary night, that I had no stomach for another disappointment.

A couple of blocks from the station I broke away from the crowd. It rolled on without me, brave and hopeful, buoyed along by candlelight and song. From the shadows I watched it go by, still full of wonder and not a little envy; and that was when I knew what it was that divided us more than anything. For the people on that march the war – the firestorms, the rapes, the endless, numbing vistas of ruin – was just a story. It had no hold over them. They could leave it and forget it, just as easily as they could forget the fallen masonry of the Frauenkirche. Their appetite was for experience, their
own
experience: raw, direct and unpredictable. Stories, for this new generation, were for bedtime; things to be bought and sold and tossed away once they had been consumed.

And this was unfortunate, because stories, which had been my refuge and my anchor for so long, were all I could ever hope to offer them.

A few weeks later Herr Andrich and Herr Zoch failed to turn up for our regular meeting. This had never happened before in all the years of our acquaintance. I sat waiting in my apartment for most of the afternoon, periodically checking and rechecking the date and time (it was possible I had lost track, one day being much like another). Finally, at around six o’clock, by which time it was dark, the telephone rang. It was Herr Andrich.

‘Are you coming over?’ I asked innocently.

‘No.’

‘Herr Zoch, then?’

‘No. We can’t. We’re needed here. We’re all needed here.’

He sounded grim and slightly out of breath. He didn’t explain what he meant by ‘here’, or, for that matter, ‘we all’ and I preferred not to ask.

‘I just wanted to tell you, comrade, that whatever happens we’ll do whatever we can to protect you.’

Herr Andrich did not normally call me comrade and I was suspicious of this sudden familiarity. In any case why should I need protecting and from whom?

In the background I heard voices, the pounding of footsteps. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘What’s happening?’

‘We may not speak again. For your sake we must never speak again until . . . until this is all over.’

‘Until what’s all over?’

There was a heavy clunk on the line, but we were still connected. I became aware of a new sound: like a badly tuned radio, like interference. It took me a moment to realise that the source was organic, human.

‘They’re here.’ It was Herr Andrich again. ‘They’re at the gates. There’s no one to . . . I don’t know how long it’ll hold them.’

I understood now where he was: at the regional headquarters of the state security apparatus on Bautznerstrasse. I could picture the scene outside, the crowds, the banners, the multitude of faces – perhaps the very same young faces I had seen on Prager Strasse: the boy with the candle, the bird woman in the white ski jacket.

‘Herr Andrich,’ I said, in spite of myself. ‘Whatever happens, don’t let anyone shoot.’

I don’t know if he heard me. There was a lot of shouting going on.

‘I must get back to the files. Goodbye, comrade,’ he said and hung up.

That was the last I ever heard from him.

As history relates, the bird woman’s optimism turned out to be well founded. There were beatings and arrests during that first night’s demonstration and others that followed, but the Russians stayed in their barracks. Without the guarantee of fraternal heavy armour the governing apparatus of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State found itself unable to govern. In a matter of weeks it vanished into memory, just as surely as if sixteen million people had simultaneously woken from a dream. For many employees of the state security apparatus their final act was to burn and shred as many records as possible before their premises were stormed (an epic task, given that the totality of the files, laid side by side, would have stretched for seventy miles). It was this that must have occupied Herr Andrich and Herr Zoch in their final operational hours.

According to press reports there was some method in this hasty bonfire of hearsay and history. The priority was to protect the identities of foreign agents and, on the domestic front, of
Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter
– that is, citizens who provided confidential information to the authorities on a regular basis – citizens like me.

58

In December, following a visit to the site by the West German Chancellor, an appeal went out from the parish of Weisser Hirsch for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche. Money poured in from all over Germany and from all over the world, but I was long gone before the first new stone was laid. The great baroque dome, images of which sprouted up everywhere on hoardings, in magazines and in tourist brochures, was alien to me, part of a reassembled past that pre-dated my arrival and my adult life. Perhaps, as many said, it was part of our heritage and therefore part of mine; but heritage, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I was a child of those ruins. They spoke to me. In their eloquent desolation they consoled me. Now they were being swept away with unashamed haste, making me an orphan all over again.

I had other reasons for leaving. The new government of all Germany had decided that the personal files of the state security apparatus would be made available to the public. Anyone who turned out to have a file could apply to view it and to learn what investigations had been conducted into their lives. Such information would include the identities of all relevant informers. It was also decreed, with some hesitation, that the files shredded in the final days of the
ancien régime
should be unshredded. The task of sticking them back together was given to forty-five civil servants, stationed in the Bavarian town of Zirndorf. Even at a rate of one hundred thousand pages a year, it was calculated that their work would take ten times longer to complete than the entire forty-year lifespan of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State. Still, the fact remained that with every passing year, with every new application, the chances of my being revealed as an
Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter
grew. Such unmaskings happened every day, in a more or less public way, the revelations creating a feeding frenzy in the press. There were dismissals, divorces and suicides. Explanations were demanded, but rarely if ever listened to. The authors of the system got off lightly. The lower ranks were left to fend for themselves. This, at least, was my impression in those early months, when hope and fear went hand in hand.

I migrated across Europe in stages, my freshly converted Ostmarks being supplemented by a healthy trickle coming in from
The Orphans of Neustadt
. This proved more valuable than I had supposed, thanks to the incompetence of the old Ministry of Culture. An agency I turned to in London discovered unclaimed and unpaid royalties in a dozen territories, some going back more than a decade. These eased my passage westwards. I stayed a while in Amsterdam, until I was tracked down by an aggressive young reporter. In France, which was my home for two and a half years, I was treated successfully for a peptic ulcer, my stomach problems turning out to be neither metaphorical nor psychosomatic in origin. England was too hectic for my taste and there seemed to be journalists everywhere. I was in London when the newspapers learned that Christa Wolf, our most famous female novelist, had been an informer for the state security apparatus. In the space of a week four different reporters approached me, asking for my opinion on the matter. I declined to give it and was forever afterwards described as ‘elusive’.

So I went west again, to Ireland, a place of bad weather and good books; and, having got there, maintained my intermittent line of march until I had reached the Atlantic Ocean. There, in west Cork, before the great grey horizon, among the low, sturdy houses and the drystone walls, I stopped. Except for one return trip to the valley, which honour demanded, I have yet to retrace my steps. In Ireland I have been left to live privately and in peace; and no has ever found me here, until now.

One place I did not visit on my long migration was Munich. I stayed away from Bernheim Media. I made no attempt to establish Wolfgang Richter as the true author of
Survivors
. For one thing, I had no way of proving such a claim. My only supporting witness would have been Michael Schilling and he had expressed no great interest in setting the record straight. He was struggling to find work by then and had no time for the finer points of cultural record. Perhaps his attitude would have been different had
Survivors
become recognised as a permanent addition to the German literary canon. But it hadn’t. The book chalked up excellent sales for a couple of years, but with no sign of a sequel, or a successor novel of any kind, it was slowly superseded by works of a less pessimistic hue. Thereafter it was generally referred to as a popular hit; rarely, if ever, as a classic. This rendered any intervention on my part academic. Even if Bernheim had believed me, what commercial incentive would there have been to produce a new edition?

As for Theresa Aden, I made no attempt to seek her out. Nor, when messages from her reached me via Michael Schilling, did I respond. This is not to say I didn’t think of her. I thought of her every day and dreamed of her every night (in my dreams my desire for her was always unqualified and unambiguous). But I couldn’t picture a real-life encounter with her that wouldn’t be either squalid or sad. I couldn’t stand to hear more lies, to be pacified or bought off. Nor was I in any hurry to draw a line under our affair, to shake hands and part – nominally but not actually – as friends. I was sure that somewhere in her soul Theresa must have craved absolution, an acknowledgement at least that there had been fault on all sides, but I saw no reason to oblige on either count. It seemed fair to me that she should live in suspense, not knowing how or in what way the fraud of Eva Aden would be revealed, because I was living the same way, courtesy of the puzzlers of Zirndorf and the open archives of the state security apparatus. In this way Richter’s book would do a little of what I had intended it to do: namely bind together Theresa’s fate and mine in a way that could not be easily undone. Was this selfish of me? Was it unforgiving? To both questions the answer is yes. But among the great panoply of sins being uncovered at that time, these seemed inconsequential and easily borne.

I made myself invisible to Theresa Aden, but she was not invisible to me. Newspapers and magazines continued to mention her name in various cultural contexts. A motion picture based on
Survivors
won several awards for production design and music, but disappointed at the box office. Critics complained that by adding a happy ending (a change made in haste after ominous test screenings) the producers had confused the central message of the film. Theresa attended the premiere at the Venice Film Festival and was quoted as saying she was ‘impressed’. I searched for photographs of the occasion, but the ones I found were all of the director and the cast. Eighteen months after that Theresa was living in Berlin. By that time the absence of a new book had become a talking point. In a feature entitled ‘New voices for a new world’ Theresa conceded that
Survivors
had been a difficult act to follow.

I laughed when I read this (partly out of amusement, partly out of relief), but my laughter was cut short by the revelation that Theresa was cohabiting with an unnamed boyfriend. This turned out not to be the agent, Martin Klaus, but a jazz pianist named Rolf. Rolf was succeeded by a property developer called Oscar Schmidt, then by no one. A year later the concluding paragraph of a brief colour supplement profile described Eva Aden as living alone. In the photograph she was depicted sitting on a park bench staring straight at the camera, as if posing for a passport. Over the years she had lost weight. Her face had a hard, sculpted look, the youthful roundness of her features having all but disappeared. The girl, I supposed, had become a woman and, as such, more of a stranger than ever. The year she had spent with me was now just one year among many; our mutual involvement an interval, an episode that could be recounted without emotion, as if it had happened to someone else.

Slowly the press mentions dried up. The occasional passing references added nothing to the sum of my knowledge. In Germany the Zirndorf effort began to wind down. Departing staff were not replaced and soon the number remaining had dwindled to less than twenty. The unmaskings and retributions gradually ceased. Meanwhile in west Cork, at the suggestion of some local residents (admiring ladies of a certain age, for the most part), I took up teaching at an adult education establishment, my subject being ‘creative writing’. A good portion of my students had never heard of me before. I preferred it that way.
The Orphans of Neustadt
remained firmly off the syllabus.

It was in Ireland, after seven years’ residence, that I finally began work on this account of my last years in the East. I set out to write it not to justify myself, or to reanimate a vanished career, but in part-fulfilment of a debt. This is the story Wolfgang Richter wanted me to write (in a dream, but also in life), or as close as I can make it. I began, I persevered through the yawning middle, but the problem was always in finishing it. The difficulty lay not in my choice of language (I chose English, partly for the challenge; mostly for the sense it gave me of a fresh start); it lay in the fact that until you came along, Miss Connolly, hot from Zirndorf and the Berlin archives, I could identify no clear or satisfying ending. My story was like a country whose borders are invisible beneath an impenetrable fog. This failure, this narrative irresolution, has tormented me more than I can say.

I had been gone more than ten years from the valley when I found a letter waiting for me at the adult education college. The stamp was German and the post mark said DRESDEN. I knew at once that it was from Theresa. I stood in the corridor, staring at the unopened envelope, trying to pretend that everything was normal as my students filed past on their way into the classroom, bestowing their usual cheery greetings. It took a feat of willpower just to smile back at them, a still greater one to leave the envelope unopened until the end of the class. Still, I doubt if anything I said that day made sense.

The letter had been written in Berlin, months before it was actually posted. It seemed Theresa had been carrying it around for some time, searching perhaps for a reliable address. The tone was strangely formal to begin with, but beneath that stiffness I detected bewilderment and anguish – and felt it too, just as if it were my own. Most of the money arising from our venture was still intact, Theresa said, and awaiting my instructions. She needed to know where to send it. Then came the questions: why had I never come forward to reclaim my book? Why had I remained silent? Why had I avoided her for so long? If she had angered me, she had a right to know how and why. She had respected my decision to disappear, she said, and to put the past behind me, but now circumstances had changed. She was sick and needed to put her affairs in order ‘just in case’. If she had ever meant anything to me, she asked that I reply.

This mention of sickness had all the hallmarks of a ploy. Perhaps the undertones of indignation were a pretence, a carapace of bluster. But such reservations hardly registered. I was overwhelmed by this simple appeal for clarity. I ran out of the college and into the street, needing to be alone and unobserved. I ended up in a churchyard. Was it possible I could still hurt Theresa after so long and from so far away? Was her eagerness to clear things up prompted by a bad conscience? Or was it possible that her feelings for me – never unmistakable, never couched in grand declarations – had outlived the satisfaction of her new-found freedom? Had our love, by some miracle, survived?

And so, in spite of all I had learned, in spite of the wounds I had determined never to reopen, in spite of the years invested in forgetting, I crumbled. The next day I sat down within sight of the sea (it was a clear, cool day in September, gulls looking over my shoulder as they drifted by on the wind) and wrote back. I told Theresa I would meet her, in Berlin if that suited her. It would be good to see her again. I was eager to know her plans for the future, I said, and if she had found happiness in our time apart. In that regard I couldn’t help adding one sentimental observation: that many of the hours I had spent with her were, with the benefit of hindsight, the happiest of my life.

I sent the letter by airmail. Weeks went by and I received no response. I wondered if Theresa might be on her way – the troublesome journey, perhaps, a small act of contrition on her part. I pictured her arriving on my doorstep, freshly soaked from an untimely downpour. I didn’t go out for days at a time, in case she should arrive while I was away. When the telephone rang (which was not often in the normal course of events) I found myself disappointed when the voice at the other end wasn’t hers. Such occasions betrayed a disturbing reality: that, like many a battered wife or bullied husband, my irrational feelings of love were stronger than any rational assessment of the facts. In such cases the imbalance lies in a general expectation of abuse or betrayal, a deep-seated conviction that the treatment is merited. But not in my case. My opinion of myself had always been higher than that. Besides, in this world what we deserve and what we get have no more relation to each other than one roll of the dice with the next – except, of course, in fiction.

Eventually my letter came back to me unopened. Accompanying it was a note from a Frau Hanssen, who turned out to be Theresa’s aunt. She told me that Theresa had succumbed to ovarian cancer some months previously. At her request the funeral had taken place at the Johannis Cemetery in Tolkewitz, close to where she had spent the last months of her life. It seemed, in the months prior to her illness, that she had just taken up a teaching position at the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music.

It was two days after I received this news that you first contacted me, Miss Connolly, with your request for an interview. You wondered if I could shed any light on some bizarre discoveries among the scrambled files of Zirndorf; in particular about a book smuggled out of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State and published under a false name, of a planned defection by myself, of a hitherto unknown informer at the heart of the literary scene, living and working in my city. My regular dealings with the state security apparatus were, I assumed, about to be made public. You were fortunate. At any other time I would have refused your request. But at that moment I could not summon the will for evasion. My mind was elsewhere – on the past, to be precise, on what could have been and never was. The future was no longer of any great concern.