Seven Lies (21 page)

Self-destruction: ‘the beginning of all philosophy'. Some other
Denker
I had to read at Humboldt. My obscure sense, whenever contemplating this particular act, that far from being a gesture of despair, it is actually one of extreme optimism. I think of Dr Serkin's reversed tarot cards. My life force – my
élan vital
, as he called it – passing, for tactical reasons, as its opposite . . . Not a desire to be dead, but to be differently alive: to be rid of a parasitical second self that has so encumbered one's spirit only the most radical surgery can remove it. One knows, rationally, that such surgery must result in the death of the patient, but that isn't the point of it at all, and the bulk of one's mind persists in regarding the extinction as a side effect; regrettable, of course, but not to be confused with the real goal: the smashing through into a new, clear, unburdened state of being. The dead man's grab at life!

T
WO THIRTY-FIVE
. Clouds filling up with yellow light, their underbellies grey. A smell of fermenting apples on the breeze. No reason to hold anything back at this point, and yet I still feel myself resisting. My old habits of silence and secrecy. Smash them!

‘. . . Stefan, dear boy. Good of you to come . . .'

Uncle Heinrich, rising with a warm smile from his desk at the Office of the Chief of the People's Police. January 1986.

The room comes back to me in vivid detail – the oak cabinets, the rows of law books, the tin globe, the old-fashioned
typewriter that looked like the offspring of a church organ and a halved artichoke – preserving itself in memory as if it knew I should be compelled to revisit it constantly over the years, as I have.

‘Look at what I have here!' my uncle says joyously. ‘It arrived this morning. It's an advance copy. I knew you'd be terribly eager to see it.'

He hands me the new issue of
Sinn und Form
.

‘Isn't that thrilling?'

Inside the magazine are two new ‘poems' of mine. Aside from not wanting to lose face after my stupid boast, I had sensed that having work published in a prestigious magazine might help me in my pursuit of Inge. Not that I thought she herself would be impressed by such a coup, or even very interested in it (I was right; she couldn't have cared less), but I felt that it would give me a certain confidence I was lacking; a basis from which to promote myself. It would be a one-off relapse into my old habits, I had vowed, and from the vague nausea filling me there in my uncle's office as I opened the magazine and went through the motions of gazing with grateful pride at my illegitimate offspring on their crisp white sheets, I knew that I was not even going to be tempted to repeat the experiment. With luck it would give me the credibility I needed in the eyes of my new acquaintances in Prenzlauer Berg, but beyond that, the sooner the whole matter disappeared back into the past, the better.

After making polite conversation with my uncle for a few more minutes, I stood up to leave.

‘Incidentally,' he said, ‘I'd like you to meet a fellow I know, a colleague of sorts. He thinks you could be of some service to him. I told him I was sure you'd be more than willing to help. May I introduce you to him when you have a moment?'

No hint of shame or awkwardness as he asked. Even in hindsight, I find it hard to say for sure that he was aware of any leverage he might have acquired over me from the favour he had just done, let alone that he was deliberately exploiting it. If there was any notion of reciprocity operating in his mind, it was simply what was fully permitted by social convention: a harmless favour done, a harmless (in his eyes) favour asked in return. If I had refused him outright he might have been a little taken aback, but perhaps that would have been the end of the matter. Anyway, I myself was still too ignorant of these affairs to grasp fully what he was asking me, and other than the usual instinctive reluctance I felt whenever anybody asked anything of me, I had no particular reason for refusing him.

So, from that little leather-upholstered antechamber to hell I found myself proceeding, a few days later, to the living room of an apartment in the quiet suburb of Hohenschonhausen. It belonged to a Lieutenant Hager, case officer in the Operational Group of Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring and penetrating cultural life and political
Aussteiger
activity in the GDR. A sandy-haired man of forty: red eyelashes, thin-bridged nose, austere mouth; pale, freckled complexion indicative of a certain constitutional delicacy, against which the hair-fine lines under his eyes and at the corners of his lips suggested an opposing effort of disciplined self-fortification. He was married, with a child, a boy of six, who was occasionally present when we met. Our first meeting was to establish that I would be willing, in principle, to work as an
Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter
, an ‘unofficial collaborator', and for him to outline the plan of action he had devised for me if I should accept. He made no overt effort to coerce me into accepting, and in fact went out of his way to stress the purely voluntary nature of this service:

‘Any time you want to stop working for us, Stefan, all you have to do is say that you categorically refuse. That's the official rule. Not all case officers lay it out as clearly as they might. For me it's an essential part of our agreement. Do you understand?'

I nodded. He seemed to be telling me the truth, and yet I had so little sense of there being any choice in the matter that I experienced my acquiescence in it not as something that might or might not happen but as something that had, once again,
already happened
. Still unclear to me whether this feeling was the result simply of an accurate reading of the forces implicit in the situation, or whether it came from some aberrant warp in my own psyche: a willingness to please, manifesting itself inside me as a feeling of irresistible pressure.

Or was there something even more dubious at work in my mind: was I, could I possibly have been, actively interested in the pursuit and destruction of the individual whom Lieutenant Hager wanted me to help him ensnare? Is it possible I was motivated not just by some dim terror of having my fraudulent poetic credentials exposed, but also by an active desire to eliminate a rival?

I am attempting to understand myself here: not to make excuses, but not to fall into the inverse vanity of exaggerating my own misdeeds either. ‘It is necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to demystify, and to harry the insult to mankind that exists in oneself': Frantz Fanon's words, drummed into us at school. I summon an image of my old self to hold up for examination. I can discern fearfulness in that unformed, boyish face; I can see a lurking, secretive ambition; I can make out all sorts of furtive, inordinate desires, but in truth I can find no sign of actual malice.

On the other hand, I can hardly be an objective judge in this matter, and it seems a little late in the day to be erring on the side of anything other than harshness . . . So, let the accused stand charged with cold-blooded complicity to destroy another human being for his personal gain!

T
HREE O'CLOCK
. Will I hear Menzer's car? I hope not. My state of mind is somewhat precarious. I think I will be able to stay put only so long as it's just a matter of simple obedience to the principle of inertia. Any stimulus requiring an act of will to resist is likely to prove too much.

Of course, it's possible he won't show up. He needed some persuading when I went down to see him again in the city. Not that he had any scruples about the act itself – or if he had, he wasn't going to risk being out-Menzered by admitting to them in the face of my own apparent indifference. But he was concerned about the risks, and even after I had demonstrated how negligible these were – a shot that would cause no alarm, no possible connection between himself and the victim and no imaginable incentive on my part to incriminate either him or, by extension, myself – he remained sceptical.

On the other hand, he clearly needed money. He had insisted I bring my payment in cash, and the sight of this as he glanced into the large envelope I handed him over our café table had an effect on him like a surging current on an appliance: something in him seemed to dilate. Though again, as if to offset any suggestion of being impressed, he immediately put on a hard, businesslike expression.

‘Well. Suppose I were to ask you to give me the other ten in advance?'

I had come prepared for something like this, and without hesitation took a second envelope from my bag.

‘I'll give you another five,' I told him – the total, as it happened, of what I had been able to cash out of my trading account. ‘The rest afterwards.'

He looked thoughtfully at the envelope.

‘OK, maybe. But I'm interested in how I'm supposed to know you'll actually give it to me afterwards.'

‘I think a better question is how will
I
know you won't keep coming back for more after I do? Who has the most leverage in this situation, after all? Considering the past you and I share.'

He laughed at that, conceding the point.

‘What about Inge, though – isn't she going to wonder about your bank balance?'

‘I deal with all our finances. She's not interested.'

‘All right. OK. Possibly maybe. Listen, though. Not that it's in my interest to say this, but do you really think this is going to solve your problems? With her?'

‘I'll worry about that,' I said.

He stared hard at me for some time. Then, abruptly, he shrugged.

‘Well, why not? Anything to help out an old pal!'

I gave him the envelope.

‘It's almost funny,' he said as we parted company a little later, ‘I was always the one who walked off with the marks-manship prize in our Hans Beimler games. Maybe I'm about to discover my true vocation!'

‘S
O
. D
ID YOU
decide on a code name?'

My second meeting with Lieutenant Hager.

‘How about Sloth?'

‘Your school nickname?'

There is very little the lieutenant doesn't know about me.

I shrug.

‘Well, it's your choice. I'll put it here in the file. You need to write out this pledge, by the way.'

‘What's that?'

‘That you're working for us entirely of your own free will.'

‘OK.'

The boy is present, sitting quietly on the floor, building a windmill out of
Lege
. He and his father belong to an ‘Interest Association' devoted to restoring old windmills.

‘Here are permits for the journal . . .'

He wants me to launch a sort of
samizdat
journal, modestly risk-taking at first, so as not to arouse suspicion of official involvement, then growing steadily more inflammatory.

‘Permit to set text in type. Permit to print. Permit to bind. Permit to distribute up to one hundred copies. Be sure to submit receipts for all expenses. We'll reimburse you every month, with a premium for good work. By that we don't mean gossip or rumour but hard facts, along with evidence that can hold up in court. Our ministry lawyers are very particular about that. Don't rush things: it takes time to get your legend accepted. We want people to see you as a serious editor, willing to take real chances; not just some fly-by-night renegade. We're going to give you your own tail; it'll add to your credibility. Wait, Detlef, that doesn't go there . . .'

He goes over to help his boy with the windmill, working from a photograph, while continuing to talk to me from the floor:

‘I often tell people in your situation to think of themselves not only as the agent of the Stasi in the peace movement,
but also as the agent of the peace movement within the Stasi. The fact is that although we do make it our business to control this so-called opposition, we're as eager as they are to avoid a direct conflict with the West, and we've recognised right from the start that many of their ideas are worth paying attention to. So you see, we can learn from you. It's just a question of whether one allows that energy to be diverted into wasteful political side issues, or whether one keeps it focused on the immediate pressing danger. Personally I find it a little immoral to be talking about, oh, I don't know, reunification, shall we say, or so-called freedom of expression, or even individual human rights, while enough Pershings and Cruise missiles to incinerate every one of us a thousand times over are being amassed right here on our borders . . .'

He tousles his son's hair, then gets up and returns to his chair, as if reminded by his own calm eloquence of the seriousness of the matter at hand.

‘You're wondering what I have to say about the Soviet SS 20s,' he continues with a smile. ‘That's all right, we can discuss anything here. Well, I'll tell you: having made quite an extensive study of these things, I can state categorically that the idea of being able to make peace without a credible threat of one's own is a suicidal illusion. We would simply be swallowed up into the capitalist order, where we would incidentally occupy the very lowest rung. Anyone proposing unilateral peace has to be in effect proposing the end of socialism, which means the end of hope for all but the most powerful and predatory groups of people on the planet, and finally of course the end of the planet itself. Which is why certain potential leaders of the movement have to be considered hostile-negative forces. They may be full of noble intentions but unfortunately that doesn't make them any less dangerous. Do you see?'

I felt that the lieutenant believed what he was saying; that his words were his own and that he had come to them by his own processes of thought. Unlike my uncle, whose ‘innocence' was no doubt largely a matter of an innate disposition to serve the prevailing system as cheerfully and faithfully as he could, Lieutenant Hager seemed to have thought hard about the cause he worked for. He prided himself on his idealism and his moral integrity (the
Lege
set was a case in point: only a zealot would have inflicted that dismal knockoff of Western Lego on his child; most men in his position would have obtained a set of the real thing). His lean, smooth-drawn face, with its lines like fine wrinkles accidentally ironed into a shirt, had a distinctly monkish quality, and I have no doubt that in his own imagination he was playing the role of the hero of conscience, so pure of heart he could engage in activities of a nature that might have tainted a less sterling soul than his own.