Seven Lies (13 page)

I was wearing a sports jacket and pressed pants from the Jumo department store. I remember becoming rapidly self-conscious about my over-formal appearance as we filed into the black-painted auditorium. Most of the other members of the audience were casually dressed, the men in faded jeans (real ones), the women in exotic, trinket-spangled garments I couldn't even name. Even Walter and Clara, though not exactly scruffy, knew enough to blend in.

With this petty but curiously upsetting matter on my mind, I found it hard to pay attention to what was happening onstage, at least until the main actress appeared. And when she did, far from making me concentrate on the play itself, the effect she had was simply one of bewilderment; bewilderment tinged with outrage.
Here's something else you'll never be able to have
, was the idea her presence aroused in me.

Undemonstrative to the point of seeming almost drugged,
she gave an appearance of immense, stilled, almost angry concentration, like some powerful and potentially dangerous machine. Physically she seemed imposingly tall and very slender (in reality she turned out to be of average height and weight). Her deep-set, blond-lashed eyes, high cheekbones, and excessively pale skin gave her a wraith-like look, further abetted by the blades of utterly straight white-blond hair falling either side of her face, and the curt slash of fringe across her forehead.

The interval came and I turned to Walter, intending to make some complimentary remark about the production and thank him for bringing me, when he said tersely:

‘Let's get out of here, shall we?'

I gaped at him, startled.

‘I mean, it's banal beyond words, no?'

Afraid of seeming naive, I converted my gape into a little indulgent grin, as if to say,
But of course, that goes without saying
.

‘Come on, then. We'll get a drink somewhere instead.'

I followed him and Clara out. They seemed in a strange hurry to get away from the place.

That night, the image of the actress appeared in my mind with startling vividness. It was there when I woke in the morning too: a gleaming intrusion. And all day at work, it hovered like the persistent afterglow of a too-bright light over everything I said and did.

I would say the word for what I felt at that point was ‘fascination', rather than ‘infatuation'. She was out of my orbit – I was well aware of that; as remote from me as a distant star, and about as likely to be capable of returning my interest.

Nevertheless, I found myself going back to the theatre a few days later, alone.

This time I got the outfit right – a lumpy old coat that had belonged to my father, over a white T-shirt I'd bought from a Polish street vendor and then carefully stained with ink. I also tried to pay a little more attention to the play itself. It was called
Macbrecht
, and it was a weird mixture of satire, horror and surreal farce, about an ambitious playwright whose even more ambitious wife eggs him on to murder all his rivals until no plays but his own can be put on anywhere in the land. It was full of witches, phantom knives, blood-spattered ghosts and strange, mad incantations. Most of the jokes went over my head. I missed the allusion to William Shakespeare's
Macbeth
, didn't know enough about what I later heard described as ‘Brecht Fatigue' to understand why our national cultural icon was being caricatured as a crazed megalomaniac, and was far too politically unaware to realise that the real object of satire wasn't Brecht at all, but the state that had enshrined him and decreed from on high all the other elements of our spiritual and political diet. All this I picked up later: at the time I was soon content to let it wash over me again, while I devoted my attention to the actress: Inge Leibus.

Again that double sense of an opening and a closing: of being given a glimpse of some new galaxy of sensations, and of simultaneously understanding that they could never be mine to experience. Anguish, then, though masked in the immediate moment by the simple rapture of beholding this otherworldly woman casting her lunar radiance over the obscure goings-on around her.

She didn't ‘act' in any sense I was accustomed to: throwing away her lines, and making no attempt to match the nimble comic gestures of the other actors. No apparent effort of ‘impersonation' to persuade one of the reality of the macabre
creature she was playing; and yet that creature was conjured very palpably into existence.

I was aware that in addition to that quality of remoteness, her allure for me had something to do with the suggestion of a violently destructive power at her disposal. Hearing her calling on the spirits to fill her with cruelty, I was taken back to the time of my adolescence, when I used to fantasise about a force powerful enough to obliterate the entire universe, or at least the part of it I myself had been born into. It seemed to me that just such a force was contained within the tall, palely incandescent frame of this woman.

To the small extent that I was able to follow the plot, I understood that a coalition of victims' relatives and sympathisers was gradually forming against the murderous couple. In contrast to the Macbrechts' stiffly formal costumes, the actors playing these parts were dressed like the audience, in jeans and tattered jackets, with the odd flourish of punk ornamentation – dyed bristles, silver chains – such as one had begun to see occasionally in TV footage of street demonstrations and rock concerts.

At the climax of the play they converged on the theatre (now fortified) where the Macbrechts were holed up, some of them carrying leafy branches, like banners of a battalion from the Green Movement. Just as this motley army was about to defeat Macbrecht and his cohorts, there was a sudden commotion in the real theatre. Several men in dark clothing ran onto the stage from the auditorium. In a swift, violent convergence, they grabbed hold of certain of the actors and began yanking them off the stage by their hair and clothes, twisting their arms behind their backs and roughly dragging them down the aisles towards the exit.

For a moment I thought this was part of the play, and was
tremendously excited by the unexpected sense of mayhem it unleashed into the air. But even when I realised this wasn't the case, I didn't fully grasp what was going on until someone beside me pointed at the actors who were just then being frog-marched right past us, and said, ‘
Schwerter zu Pflugscharen
', and I saw for the first time that each of these actors was wearing a badge with the swords-to-ploughshares insignia on it.

This insignia, depicting a blacksmith hammering a large sword into a ploughshare, was the emblem of the unofficial peace movement. It had recently been outlawed as part of a crackdown on unsanctioned anti-nuclear activity, and you could get arrested for wearing it.

With their odd, almost squeamish punctiliousness, the authorities appeared to have decided to restrict their actions against the play to clear violations of the law, singling out only those actors sporting the offending emblem, and studiously ignoring everyone else.

It was all over very quickly, and there was something haughtily impartial about it, as though one had been witnessing a natural, nonhuman phenomenon. From outside we heard the slam of car doors and the roar of engines as the prisoners were driven off.

I could hear my mother's voice very clearly in my head, advising me to leave at once or risk ‘receiving disadvantage'. I realised that Walter and Clara must have spotted the badges early on in the play the other evening and smelled trouble. That, rather than some lofty aesthetic scruple, had been the cause of their hasty departure. Not that I thought any the worse of them for having left: I probably would have scuttled off myself now if some absurd, entirely unwarranted sense of opportunity hadn't proved even stronger than my natural caution, and compelled me to linger.

The reaction in the theatre, after the first shock, was oddly muted. Some people did scuttle off. Others stood whispering in small groups, sneaking nervous looks around them. But still others seemed completely blasé, acting as if nothing at all unusual or significant had taken place.

Some of these now wandered onto the stage, where they stood smoking and talking with the remaining members of the cast. A tall, intelligent-looking young man in silver-framed glasses was chatting with the actor who had played Macbrecht, exchanging what I took to be wryly amusing comments about what had just occurred. After a moment, they were joined by the actress, Inge Leibus, still in costume.

I watched them standing there together in the glare of the stage lights. Something in their gestures, their facial expressions, their laconic, almost disdainful way of carrying themselves caused a wave of envious longing to travel through me. I stared at them from the relative darkness of my seat, mesmerised.

The auditorium was emptying out. Reluctantly, I made my way to the exit.

A woman with a bush of wiry curls came out of the theatre after me.

‘Menzer's place,' she said to a group of people dawdling outside. At once they grew more animated. One of them called out to another group that had gone on ahead towards Kollwitzplatz:

‘Hey – Menzer's place!'

The group turned back towards the theatre, picking up stragglers on the way, and then all of them began to move off. I stood there, wishing that I too could be a part of this cheerful expedition, but too shy, too close still to the days of my contagious unpopularity, to dare risking a snub by inviting
myself along. Rain was falling, sour on the tongue and eyelids. I was about to cross the street to the U-Bahn when the curly-haired woman turned back to me. She gave me a brisk once-over, appraising me from top to toe. To my great joy, she appeared to judge me acceptable.

‘Coming?' she asked, almost impatiently.

‘Well, I – I haven't been invited.'

She tossed her head with a little scornful grimace. ‘Don't have to be invited. It's open house at Menzer's. Everyone's welcome.'

I joined her.

‘Margarete,' she said, shaking my hand as we set off together down the wet sidewalk of Saarbrücker Strasse.

‘Stefan Vogel.'

She had a small face with thick brown eyebrows and a sharp red nose like a bird's beak.

‘Poet?' she asked.

I looked at her, caught off my guard by this inaccurate but curiously pertinent guess. I found that I didn't want to deny it, though I couldn't quite bring myself to affirm it either.

‘You don't look like a painter,' she added, as if by way of explaining herself.

‘No –'

‘Wrists too thin.'

‘I'm not a painter.'

‘What I thought.' She nodded, causing her chin to disappear for a moment into her plump neck.

I was aware of having somehow used an honest answer to establish false credentials.

‘What about you?' I asked.

She gave a squeaky laugh. ‘I'm nobody. I'm Margarete. Menzer's sister.'

We turned down an alley of derelict buildings with jet-black oblongs where the windows had been. At the end was a free-standing tenement house in better repair (the ground-floor windows were glazed, and the stucco walls appeared to have been spared the defective latex paint that had been slathered over just about everything in the seventies, only to flake off five years later, along with the stucco beneath). The front door was fastened with a heavy padlock. We stopped here, and stood waiting in the drizzle.

After a few minutes, the tall, bespectacled man I'd seen on the stage before came sauntering down the alley with his own entourage, among them the Macbrecht actor and Inge.

Smiling faintly at the rest of us while continuing his conversation, the man climbed the steps to the front door and unfastened the padlock.

My officious companion tapped me on the arm. ‘That's Menzer,' she informed me with a little satisfied pursing of her lips. We followed this illustrious-looking personage into the house.

And so, in that casual manner, I entered into a new phase of my life: the last one before I left with Inge for the West.

I say ‘casual', and that was how it felt, but of course the more one learns about that place and those times, the less plausible the word ‘casual' comes to seem in connection with even the most trivial aspects of one's life. From the vantage of the present it seems to me that even at this early stage in the drama that followed, the likelihood is that I was already under the interested scrutiny of powers outside myself, and was already submitting to the guidance of their first, imperceptibly gentle touches.

Inside Menzer's house, a bare-floored hallway led into a long, narrow room, cluttered with books, papers, paintings and odd bits of sculpture that on closer inspection turned out to be pieces of furniture improvised out of junk.

As the twenty or so of us trooped in, Menzer wandered across to a table where something appeared to have caught his eye. He picked up a piece of paper and glanced briefly over it. A look of remote amusement appeared on one side of his handsome face.

‘What is it, Menzer?' a blond-bearded man asked eagerly. This man looked familiar to me, though I couldn't place him.

Menzer held out the piece of paper by a corner, though before the man could take it, Margarete darted forward and snatched it with a squeak of laughter. She scanned it rapidly.

‘Menzer's got another Notice to Appear!' she exclaimed, handing the paper to the other man, who looked at it admiringly, then sent it circulating around the room. It passed through my own hands, though only long enough for me to take in the words
Notice to Appear
and
Normanenstrasse
.

‘Why don't they leave you alone, Menzer?' a green-eyed young girl – no more than twenty – asked.

Menzer gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Probably they just want to show me they can still get in the house without smashing down the door.' He crinkled one side of his mouth. ‘It's almost funny.'

‘But what will they do to you?'