Seven Lies (6 page)

I found what I was looking for, copied it out, put away the volumes and ran back upstairs, returning the key to Brandt.

Kitty was back. So, fortunately, was my mother, making it temporarily impossible for Kitty to question me about my alleged encounter with Jürgen. She gave me an anguished look, which I ignored. Just before dinner, I found her waiting for me as I came out of the bathroom. ‘He wasn't there,' she whispered. I tried to look surprised. ‘Maybe someone recognised him. He seemed nervous.' ‘You said he looked –' Kitty managed, breaking off guiltily as my mother came out of the kitchen.

She regarded us a moment. The notion of Kitty and myself having any kind of relationship independent of the rest of the household, let alone something to whisper about, clearly both surprised and disturbed her. With a little movement at the back of her protruberant eyes, suggestive to me of a camera shutter opening and closing, she seemed to absorb the situation and store it away for further reflection, before ushering us on into dinner.

It was our custom to sit in the living room after dinner and listen to the latest instalment of one of the Russian novels that were continually being serialised on the radio. My father would sit back in his armchair with a glass of plum alcohol and pass into what seemed a state of innocent, genuine contentment. My mother fidgeted, torn between a sense that there might be something not altogether highbrow about this
method of ingesting culture, and the relish she took in telling people that this was how we passed our evenings as a family. (When she did this, she would deliberately stress the humble nature of the entertainment, implying, with her genius for suggestion, something simultaneously populist and austere in our tastes.) Perched restlessly on her chair, she would nod gravely at the passages of sententious generalisation, smile mysteriously at odd moments, as if to suggest an attunement to notes of humour too rarefied for the rest of us to catch, and sometimes sigh, ‘Ah, yes,' apparently remembering a passage from her numerous readings of the book in her youth. Otto and I sat for the most part stupefied with boredom, though lately Otto had begun paying more attention. Since entering adolescence, he had made a private cargo cult out of any scraps of drama that could possibly be construed as erotic, hoarding them away for use in his private fantasies, and continually on the lookout for more. Kitty was seldom present: she usually went out in the evenings; if not, she stayed in her room.

That evening I announced that I would not be joining the family in the living room. I waited to be asked why, and with a joyful sense of importance answered that I needed to work on one of my poems. A bright, shining truth that seemed to bathe me in a fluorescent aura as I uttered it. I was immediately excused.

In my room, I took the prose translation from my pocket and set to work. The name of the poet I had stumbled on, and who, in the company of one or two others, was to prove so fatefully useful to me over the next few months, meant nothing to me at the time. But just as our janitor had for many years provided me with my mental image of the West German chancellor, simply because he bore the same name
(leading to a great pang of bittersweet surprise when I first saw the exquisite, civilised, elfin face of Willy Brandt in the newspapers on the occasion of his momentous visit to Erfurt in 1970), so between Walt Disney (a controversial, if not actually unmentionable name at that time) and the word ‘
Witz
', meaning joke or wit, I formed the image of my stolen poetic persona as a kind of goofy, playful, disreputably capitalistic character. Though I couldn't read English, I had noticed that his lines were long, uneven and unrhymed. On a whim, I decided to reverse each of these qualities. Almost as soon as I began, I found myself strangely enjoying it – not that I discovered any great talent for producing short, regular, rhyming lines, but the very process of this weird inversion had a peculiarly natural, almost familiar feeling about it, as though I had already been doing it for years.

While I was happily working away, the door opened and Kitty came quietly into the room. Needless to say, she was after more information about her beloved Jürgen. What exactly did he say? What was his tone of voice? What had he been wearing? I sensed that she wanted the truth to match the romantic quality of her own feelings for the man. Since I was the sole source of this ‘truth', I had it in my power either to bestow or to withhold what she wanted. It was unusual for me to find myself in a position of power over another human being. I was aware of it not so much in the Brandt sense of something to gloat over and exploit, as of a kind of transformative agent: a means of introducing a sudden and extreme volatility into a hitherto static situation. ‘Well, his exact words were just, “Ask Kitty to come down and see me,”' I told her, ‘but the way he said them was as though seeing you was the most important thing to him in the world.' I remembered she had knitted a red scarf for him, and I added
that he was wearing that. A look of ardent longing came into her eyes. Gratitude also. She was perhaps twenty-six, not well educated, but in her quiet way fuelled by a passionate vitality that made her presence in a room always a positive enhancement. I knew that Otto had reassessed her lately from the point of view of his emerging sexuality, and found her to be desirable. As she looked at me, her eyes brightening with everything I said, I felt a kind of vicarious desire – as if I were Otto – and a corresponding rise in the value of the power I was wielding. Had I actually been Otto, I could surely have turned this situation to my advantage. Not least because Kitty, unsophisticated soul that she was, seemed at some level to be confusing me – the conveyor of pleasurable tidings – with Jürgen himself. For a moment the room seemed to brim with potentialities, as the two of us populated it with emblems of ourselves, each other, Otto and Jürgen, all conversing with one another. I felt that I was being given a foretaste of the world of adult passions, and a strong excitement came into me.

Footsteps approached. Kitty abruptly left the room. I heard my mother say ‘Hello, Kitty,' in a bemused tone. She then appeared in my doorway.

‘What are you and Kitty up to? You seem to be whispering like a pair of conspirators whenever I see you.'

She was smiling with her mouth open. She had two smiles: a close-mouthed smile for formal occasions, and an open-mouthed, vulnerably toothy smile for when she was being a mother on intimate terms with her children. I sensed, however, something duplicitous in her choice of smile now, as though she felt guilty about her compulsion to pry, or at any rate was trying to disguise it as innocent curiosity.

‘What were you talking about?'

‘Oh, nothing serious,' I said, racking my brains for something to tell her when she questioned me more forcefully, as I knew she would.

‘Please tell me what you were talking about.'

‘Kitty wants to knit something special for your birthday,' I managed to lie. ‘She was asking me what I thought you would like.'

This silenced her for a moment. Seizing the advantage, I told her that Kitty had wanted the gift to be a surprise, and that now we had spoiled that. My mother looked uncomfortable, distressed even, and for a moment I felt an almost overwhelming urge to confess to all the absurd, trivial, but increasingly exhausting deceits her encouragement of my poetry had engendered.

‘All right,' she said, ‘we won't say a word to Kitty, and I'll act completely surprised on my birthday. Tell her to make me a matching hat, scarf and gloves. Blue, with white falcons on.'

And so that subsidiary chain reaction of unpleasantnesses finally petered out. Except that Kitty had to spend all her free time over the next few weeks knitting woollens for my mother.

M
EANWHILE
, the main sequence continued. The month passed, and preparations began for the next soirée. Eggs were hard-boiled and sprinkled with paprika. Chunks of canned Cuban pineapple were rolled in slices of ham. ‘Plain, honest fare,' my mother would say as she served various combinations of these things. ‘None of your Central Committee foie gras in
this
household.' As always in her assertions of humility, family self-esteem was maintained by the unstated, counter-vailing facts of the matter, which were that for most of our
visitors, even these relatively modest items represented a gastronomic treat.

It was November – windy and wet. Out of the bleary Berlin night guests began arriving, stamping their chilly feet in the hall, hanging their water-absorbent GDR raincoats on our iron coat rack.

I was in an agitated state. The idea of actually having to stand up in front of these people and reveal the fruits of my dubious labours was suddenly beginning to fill me with fear. For the first time it struck me that somebody might expose me as a fraud.

Uncle Heinrich hadn't arrived – his work often kept him late. I moved among the guests with waves of tension floating through my stomach. To my surprise, no one mentioned the performance they had made me promise to give. Either they had all forgotten, or – as I began to suspect – they had reached a tacit agreement among themselves to let the matter drop. Did they feel sorry for having pressured me? Or was it that they were really not very interested in hearing me read after all? Despite my anxieties, I found myself strangely resenting both of these possibilities. After an hour or so, I saw Uncle Heinrich's official limo – an old Czech Tatra – pull up on the street below. He came in, his usual kindly self, apologising for his lateness with a humility that never failed to flatter these people, any one of whom he could have destroyed with no more than his signature on a piece of paper.

He greeted me warmly, but he too failed to mention my promised reading. My deepening stage fright was compounded by a new anxiety, that I might not actually be called to the stage at all. The milk of human kindness may not have flowed in our household, but the milk of judicious approval for prowess in sanctioned fields could occasionally
be made to trickle. It was the only nourishment going, and I evidently thirsted for it.

Across the room I saw Franz Erhardt speaking with my uncle. I drifted over. Erhardt watched me approach, smiling thinly as I arrived, without pausing in his talk. I felt sure that he of all people could not have forgotten my reading, and was deliberately avoiding the subject out of professional rivalry. I could feel him willing me to leave, but I stood my ground. Eventually I looked at my watch and sighed so ostentatiously that they were obliged to notice.

‘What is it, dear boy?' my uncle asked, concerned.

‘Oh, nothing. Just that – well, I suppose I'm going to have to get those poems out. I've been dreading this.'

‘Poems? Oh! Of course! Your reading!'

‘I'd really rather not do it, Uncle Heinrich.'

‘Nonsense! No backing down now!' He wagged a finger at me and summoned my mother over.

‘Stefan promised to read to us. I'd quite forgotten. Now he's trying to wriggle out of it again.'

My mother looked at me. It seemed to me there was a little movement, a vague twinge of guilt, in the expressive depths of her eyes, as if she were at the point of supporting me in my alleged reluctance, as my father had the month before. Before she could speak, though, I shrugged my shoulders and said with an air of defeat:

‘All right, I'll read them, if that's what you all want.'

I went to fetch the pages from my room. When I returned, the guests had been assembled in a circle around the piano, where Erhardt had read the previous month.

I had never addressed an audience before. My mouth had gone dry and my heart was pounding in my chest. The rows of people before me resembled nothing so much as the teeth
of a gaping shark, ready to tear me apart. I wanted to flee from it, but it seems I also wanted to put my head in its mouth.

I managed to recite what I had written. The guests listened in silence, and when I finished there was applause.

For the record, the English equivalent of the lines I concocted would have sounded something like this:

I celebrate myself, myself I sing
And my beliefs are yours, as everything
I have is yours, each atom. So we laze –
My soul and I – passing the summer days
Observing spears of grass . . .

And so on – an anodyne burble that was clearly too boring to raise suspicion. At any rate, nobody unmasked me.

But I realised almost as soon as it was over that not everything was as it had been before. The room may have been the same – the atmosphere of simulated conviviality certainly felt unchanged – but I myself was changed.

At first I didn't understand what had happened, but as the evening continued, with every guest obliged to make some kind of congratulatory remark, I realised that my attitude towards other people had undergone a radical alteration. Quite simply, the straightforward relation of cordial respect, or at least neutral interest, that is supposed to exist between people who have no prior reason not to respect each other was no longer available to me. It was gone, as if a cord had been cut. In its place, it seemed, was an intricately shuttling machinery of silent interrogation and devious concealment. Everyone I spoke to seemed newly illuminated by what I had done. Depending on certain
minute signals given off by the movement of their eyes or the inflection of their voices (I felt suddenly attuned to these things), they were disclosed either as fellow hypocrites in whom the cord had also been cut (they had seen through my deception but weren't saying so), or else as innocent fools (they hadn't the guile to see through my deception). I was no doubt wrong in most of my individual diagnoses, but the idea that such a division might exist – between those in whom the cord has been cut, and those in whom it remains intact – was a revelation, and I still find myself appraising the people I meet on that basis.

My Uncle Heinrich, whose voluble enthusiasm for my performance led me to categorise him among the innocents, proposed that I should give another recital soon, since this one had been such a success. The proposal was immediately seconded by the person he was talking to, and by the logic of escalation that prevails in circumstances where power alone has meaning, someone else then had to suggest that I do it the very next month, only to have someone else trump them by saying I should do it
every
month. ‘That way we'll all be able to witness first-hand the development of your young prodigy, Frau Vogel.' And before I knew it, I was looking at the prospect of my little act of stealth, which I had thought would now be cast off into the back-draft of history, having instead to be repeated, month after month after month.