Seven Lies (16 page)

Among the few things I took in during my stint in the Philosophy Department at Humboldt was the idea – I forget whose – that the underlying motive for all human action is the desire for
recognition
– recognition of one's worth and dignity as a human being, without which one was a nonperson; a slave. The concept had articulated very precisely the obscure cravings of my own soul, and it had lodged itself in my imagination. It had felt incontrovertible. And it was
surely what motivated me now as I replied to Inge and Paul's question with a gesture of assent – half nod, half shrug – feeling instantly the immense weariness of spirit that, in my experience, accompanies the discharging of all such acts of self-destructive folly.

‘Yes, that's right,' I said.

‘Oh, yeah?' Paul replied, baring his teeth in a smile that seemed to me fully Brandtian in its mocking incredulity. ‘Where can we read some of your stuff?'

I hesitated. Inge was looking at me with a pleasant, innocent smile, waiting politely for the simple answer to a simple question. I didn't feel that she herself was all that curious as to where she could read my ‘stuff', and my answer, when I gave it, wasn't to impress her so much as to prevent any suggestion arising in her mind that I might be a less than straightforward character. As far as Paul was concerned, I perhaps
was
guilty of wanting to impress him; to force him to ‘recognise' me. The situation became further complicated by the fact that Menzer, who had been wandering in our direction, was now within earshot. With a feeling of reckless abandon, I blurted:

‘Sinn und Form.'

‘
Sinn und Form?
No kidding!'

Sinn und Form
had been the leading journal of the literary establishment throughout my childhood, and as far as I knew, still was. My Uncle Heinrich was a subscriber and occasional contributor, and always brought the latest issue with him when he came to visit. I never read it, but its sober appearance, lying on the coffee table, was as permanent a feature in my private landscape as the Kurt Teske nude or the American radio (before Otto smashed it). It was a part of who I was, which is no doubt why its name tripped so readily off my tongue.

‘Have I died of boredom or did I just hear the words
Sinn und Form
?' Menzer drawled, joining us.

‘This man's published his poems there,' Paul told him.

Menzer looked at me, as if noticing me for the first time. To my surprise he treated me to a smile –a half smile, at least – and held out his hand to me.

‘By the way, I'm Menzer,' he said. ‘We haven't met properly.'

‘Stefan Vogel.'

‘I didn't mean to be rude there. That's good, getting your stuff in
Sinn und Form
. Almost impressive. I used to try them myself. They never accepted anything, so naturally I pretend to despise them for being hopelessly middle-of-the-road. Which issues are your poems in? I'd like to read them.'

I'd seen that last bit coming, at least, and by the time he got to it, my sprinter's imagination, with its knack for the short-term solution, had come up with an answer:

‘They were only just accepted. I think they'll be out in the next issue.'

‘Good. Well, be sure to bring it along when it comes out.'

‘I will.'

‘I'd like to read them too,' Inge said, smiling at me.

And there I was: back on the treadmill again, back in my little hell of vainglory, deceit, and desperate expedient. And whereas the price before had merely been a few years of my manhood, it was now apparently to be my soul.

I see that I am slowing down as I reach this part of my story. As a matter of fact, I seem to be grinding to a halt. It's October now – almost a month since I began: a month-long torrent of memory, spilling out with unexpected swiftness and ease. (Possible I overestimated this writing business? It seems straightforward enough when you have something to say.) But now I feel as though I'm back in my room on Micklenstrasse before I raided my mother's trunk, trying to wring a poem out of my own dry brain . . . I seem to have a strong reluctance, even now, to resurrect the events that took place over the next few months: dusting off the old anthology to create another little set of masterpieces (Brandt had gone by then, replaced by an obliging woman with a cheerful smile for everyone); taking them up to my Uncle Heinrich in his book-filled room in the Office of the Chief of the People's Police; brazening out my own shame to ask if he would do me a little favour and recommend my efforts to the editors of
Sinn und Form
for their next issue . . .

Can't seem to drag myself back there. Can't bring myself to spell it all out even in the knowledge that I will be past caring by the time Inge or anybody else gets to read about it.

But speaking of that there is perhaps another factor in this sudden inhibition.

A few days ago I did something I'd been meaning to do for some time: double-check on the terms of our life insurance policy. Just as well I did, as I appear to have a certain amount still to learn about the defensive instincts of large capitalist institutions. It turns out that what I have in mind is not after all the ticket to an easy quarter of a million dollars for Inge. All the insurance company pays out in that event is the sum of what you've paid in: a few hundred bucks at most. So much for ‘converting myself into gold'.

A blow. Not that the future awaiting me, so eloquently summarised by that glass of wine in my face, becomes any more conceivable. Life without Inge – a certainty once these revelations break her spell – is a prospect I have zero interest in pursuing. From my point of view she
is
life; all I want of life. I have felt this since I carried her off from Berlin, and the years since have merely strengthened that feeling. Even so, without the consoling lustre of making her rich (or at least giving her the means to relaunch herself into her own life), the act of aborting that future becomes suddenly a bleaker, starker matter. Hence, no doubt, my Scheherazade-like reluctance to get to the end of this tale.

Perhaps I should simply tell what happened from Inge's point of view; that way I could get around certain more delicate matters arising from my visit to my uncle, without being untruthful.

If I did this, the story would present Thilo's sudden rejection of Inge as an act of inexplicable callousness on his part, unwarranted even by the fact of his latest arrest, this time on the graver than usual charge of sedition.

Out of the blue (this version would go), hand-delivered by our ever-solicitous friend Margarete Menzer, Inge receives a smuggled jail note from her fiancé, telling her coldly to forget
about him, advising her to forget about politics too and concentrate on her acting, since that was evidently where her heart was, and then laconically informing her that a few days before his arrest he had married an old girlfriend in Jena, a full-time activist in the peace movement. Margarete solemnly confirms the story, citing the testimony of a friend of hers in Jena who was present at the wedding ceremony.

Distraught, and unable to make contact with Thilo himself, Inge increasingly takes refuge in the sympathetic companionship of her new friend, Stefan Vogel. The quietly supportive attentions of this young man have already won her affection, so that when the bolt from the blue arrives – Thilo's arrest and sudden marriage – his friendship assumes a new importance.

What follows does so with a rapidity that feels at once exhilarating and utterly out of step with any real developments in her heart. The latter will come in their own time, she tells herself. Meanwhile, she finds it strangely pleasurable to violate the delicate mechanism of her own emotional nature; to subvert or even destory the Inge Leibus on whom the pain of rejection by the one man she has ever loved has been inflicted.

One Saturday, on a perverse whim, she suggests to Stefan that they go to the horse races, something she has never had the slightest interest in doing before now. Ever obliging, Stefan takes the S-Bahn with her out to the Hoppegarten Racetrack. They sit together in the sunny freshness of the spring day, high up in the red brick grandstand, with a copy of the
Rennkurier
, picking out horses for each other to bet on. The racetrack has a pleasantly raffish atmosphere. With its smells of sweat and beer and horse dung, not to mention the distinctly uncommunist financial activities permitted to take
place within its precincts, it gives one the feeling of having been released into a tolerant, almost relaxed universe. This isn't of course the case, as the large number of purple-trousered Soviet officers strolling about with their girlfriends testifies, but even this sanctioned, illusory freedom raises the spirits. And perhaps because the horses themselves, by their sheer vividness and grandeur, succeed in temporarily ousting any civic agency from the centre of one's consciousness, it allows one to occupy one's body as an animal of flesh and blood for a moment, rather than as a ‘citizen' or a ‘comrade'.

A fraught joy takes hold of Inge. The pain of Thilo's disappearance continues to ache inside her, but over it a thin euphoric sheen appears to have formed. Impulsively, she puts her hand on Stefan's shoulder and brushes his cheek with her lips. He laughs his quiet, serious laugh.

‘Choose another horse for me,' he tells her.

‘All right.'

She picks a name at random; a rank outsider. He goes down, places the maximum stake: ten marks. A little later she's gripping his hand tightly, as they watch the horse thundering past its rivals into the final stretch.

‘I'll take you out to lunch' Stefan offers, fanning the winnings in his hand.

They lunch at the Müggelturm Restaurant, Inge ignoring her heaped plate of steak and mushrooms in favour of the sweet Bulgarian wine, gazing with increasingly heavy-lidded eyes at the sleek faces of the party functionaries and their pampered-looking mistresses feeding around them.

‘What am I doing here?' she murmurs. Stefan smiles gravely, takes her hand across the table, squeezes it gently, brings it to his lips with a look of tentatively ironic gallantry and plants a kiss on it. She smiles, feels a pang of longing for Thilo that
threatens to spill over into a sob, and swallows it back down with a gulp of syrupy wine.

‘Take me home, Stefan.'

As they walk arm in arm down the street, they pass one of the
Exquisit
boutiques where imported luxuries are sold for Western currency. As with the racetrack and the restaurant, Inge has never before entered such a place. In the high-minded world of her father's home and the peace movement, it is second nature to believe that the one thing worse than failed communism is successful capitalism.

But after all, she has just been betting on the horses, hasn't she; getting half drunk at a well-established symbol of the hypocrisy of the higher echelons of the party; and wasn't it Thilo himself who told her to forget about politics? All right, then: so be it. Let the cup of degradation be drunk to its dregs! They slow to a halt at the entrance to the boutique, then wander in together without a word.

The goods – heavy binoculars and cameras, thick crystal bottles of perfume, lustrous Italian shoes and ties – have a charged presence unaccounted for by their ostensible function. Bathed in the brownish light of their display cases, they seem to her like ceremonial objects from some occult religion. In her heightened state, she feels as though she has entered the force field of some immense and distinctly sinister power. She touches the black lamb's-wool collar of a short, beautifully tailored coat made of green suede. A little to her surprise she sees that it is communist-built rather than Western:
Interpelz
, the label reads. Down some new conduit of thought, opened no doubt by the Bulgarian wine, runs the somewhat chimerical idea that this, unlike the Western items, would be an acceptable possession; that it represents not the familiar idea of luxury based on exploitation and exclusion,
but a token fetched back from some egalitarian utopia of the future, where everyone will be dressed in such a coat, and that to own it would merely be to assert one's faith in such a future.

‘Why don't you try it on?' she hears Stefan say.

‘Don't be ridiculous! Look how much it costs.' She holds the price tag out to him.

‘Try it on anyway. I'd like to see how you look.'

With an apprehensive glance at the store clerk, Inge slips off her flimsy anorak and swims her hand down the fleece-lined sleeves of the coat. It fits perfectly, gloving her long-armed torso like a second skin, the collar soft against her neck.

‘My God, you're beautiful,' Stefan murmurs. The words seem to come from him involuntarily. He is gazing at her in what appears to be a state of mesmerised admiration. It makes her a little uncomfortable, but also – she has to admit – excited. For a moment, as though trying on a new personality along with the coat, she finds herself imagining what it might be like to be the powerful partner in a relationship, the object of such an intense, helpless-seeming veneration.

‘I think you should look in the mirror,' Stefan says.

She hesitates.

‘Come on, have a look.'

An odd habit of hers, inculcated in her at an early age, is to avoid looking in mirrors.

‘Come on, it won't hurt you,' he whispers again with a grin. And in the spirit of wilful self-desecration that has been upon her all day, she moves with him across the floor to the full-length mirror.

‘How about it?'

She looks in the mirror. As always on reacquainting herself
with her appearance, she has the troubling sense of being confronted by a competing destiny: a happy, thoughtless existence based on physical beauty. The chic cut and glamorising detail of the coat seem to pull her almost irresistibly into this glazed, alternate image of herself.

‘I don't care for it.' Brusquely, she pulls her arms out of its sleeves and hangs it back on the rack.