Seven Lies (7 page)

There was one small upset before the soirée ended. A guest went into the bathroom and discovered Otto slumped on the floor, dead drunk. He had passed out while throwing up into the toilet.

Otherwise, the evening was considered a triumph, and for the next period of my life I devoted most of my energies to maintaining the façade of ‘poet-intellectual' that my mother's
warped pride had created and that I now began to half believe in myself.

It was a peculiar kind of drudgery – exhausting, depleting, and yet somehow compulsive. Like an inhabitant of hell – the hell of Sisyphus and Tantalus – I had a task, a labour, all of my own, and I felt inextricably bound to it. In its service life became a series of furtive routines. The stealing of the aquavit. The concealment of the theft. The bribing of Brandt. The removal of the key from his waist. The dark half hour in the storage room where I opened the trunk and copied the selected pages. The turning of the pages into ‘poetry'. And then finally the nacreous glory of my monthly soul-bath in that crowd of admiring, captive faces.

A few years later, when I was making a private study of the career of Joseph Stalin, I came across descriptions of his seventieth birthday: the enormous portrait of him suspended over Moscow from a balloon, lit up at night by searchlights; the special meeting of the Soviet Academy of Sciences honouring ‘the greatest genius of the human race' . . . The festivities culminated in a gala at the Bolshoi Theatre where the leaders of all the world's communist parties stood up one by one to make elaborately flattering speeches to Stalin, and lavish him with gifts. One can imagine his state of mind as he sat on the stage receiving these tributes – the absolute disbelief in the sincerity of a single word being uttered; the compulsive need to hear them none the less; the antennae bristlingly attuned to the slightest lapse in the effort to portray conviction . . .

It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator.

One day I arrived home from school to find Otto remonstrating in a loud voice with my mother. I wandered into the kitchen, where the scene was taking place. Otto's broad, open face was a burning red colour. My mother was at her iciest.

‘What I'm wondering is what kind of personal inadequacy this behaviour signifies. Perhaps it makes you feel more grownup to get drunk, is that it?'

‘But I didn't do it!'

‘It's a little pathetic, Otto, the thought of you sneaking in here to steal alcohol and then – what? – drinking it all alone under your blankets? Or is this what you do when you lock yourself in the bathroom?'

Otto flushed a deeper red. Although he had successfully defied my mother over the matter of becoming an artist, he still hadn't fully weaned himself of the need for her fundamental approval, which meant that he was still partly under her control. On her side, I think the threat of his independence of spirit made her more anxious than ever to test her power over him. She was constantly needling him at this time. Sometimes he would explode at her, as he had over the drawing classes, but more often he would simply come to a standstill, immobilised by a mixture of hurt, incomprehension and a need to be reinstated in her good opinion.

‘It's also a bit unmanly. But perhaps you don't wish to grow into a real man. Perhaps you find the career of a social parasite more appealing? Do you? I ask because I assume you realise that that's where all this is leading . . .' The ‘all' here derived from the fact that he had made himself sick with alcohol on two or three other occasions since the evening of my ‘triumph'.

Otto's voice had grown strained, constricted. He gritted his teeth. ‘I didn't
take
the aquavit. Somebody else must have taken it.'

I leaned against the enamel sink, observing. This was
my
life unfolding here, but it appeared to be doing so through the medium of someone else, as though it had acquired an existence separate from me.

‘I see. You prefer to get someone else into trouble than face up to your own weakness. All right, let's hear it. Who would you like to accuse of stealing the bottles?'

‘I don't know.' Otto glanced at me, then looked uncomfortably away. He shrugged.

‘Stefan could have taken them just as easily . . .'

I said nothing. It was clear to me that I didn't need to object to this or deny it. My absolving was embedded in the logic of the scene, and required no contribution from me personally.

‘Ah,' my mother said, ‘I'm beginning to understand. You're suffering from jealousy of your younger brother. Well, well.'

‘What? I'm just saying he
could
–'

‘Correct me if I'm wrong, Otto, but I believe it was you who passed out drunk on the bathroom floor the night Stefan first read his poems? I've been trying not to regard that as an episode inspired by anything so petty-minded and bourgeois as envy. I hoped it might have been simple exuberance at
your brother's success. But I see I must have overestimated your character.'

Otto blinked in a bewildered way, his large hands hanging helplessly at his sides.

‘I . . . do . . . not . . . envy . . . Stefan!' He spoke thickly, as if from a deep fog of pain. I knew intimately what he would be feeling: the intolerable sense of injustice, the animal-like bafflement at his tormentor. It would be hypocritical to say that I was immune to the vague dispassionate satisfaction any child experiences at the chastisement of a sibling, but at the same time I could almost feel the lump that I knew to be thickening and welling in his throat, thickening and welling in my own.

‘Perhaps it's my fault as a mother. Perhaps I should never have encouraged Stefan in his talent once it became clear that you were without talent. But notice how frankly I can speak to you about this. Do you understand why? Because your lack of talent has never made you a lesser person in my eyes. In your own eyes, perhaps, but in mine, no. We happen to be lucky enough to live in a society that values all individuals equally, provided they are honest and productive, and I've always assumed anyone brought up in my household would have the intelligence to see that this was as true inside the home as out. Was I wrong, Otto? Have I made you feel less important than your brother? Is that why you stole from us? Please answer me. I'm trying to understand you. It may even be that I owe you an apology for overestimating your –'

And suddenly Otto did explode. Like a mad bull he threw himself around the kitchen, picking up plates and glasses and smashing them on the floor, all the while roaring wildly with rage. Casting about for something more spectacular to destroy,
his eye lit on the instant coffee wireless my father had brought back from New York. Too status-rich to languish in the privacy of a bedroom, yet too obviously out of place in the living room, this now occupied a prominent shelf in the kitchen, visible from the corridor outside, the chrome letters of its maker's insignia always polished to a high gleam. Grabbing it from the shelf, Otto paused a moment, looking directly at my mother, as though waiting for a further signal from her before deciding what to do with this revered object.

‘That, I think, is something you will regret breaking, Otto,' she said quietly, ‘but go ahead, break it, if that's what you want to do. As I say, I assume you know where this is leading.'

Otto smiled and hurled the wireless to the floor, where the coffeemaking part of it broke into thick glass chunks. Then he charged out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

L
ATER THAT EVENING
he was brought home by two cops in grey-green uniforms –
Volkspolizei
. My mother invited them into the living room. One of them hung in the doorway, overawed, it seemed to me, by the cultured atmosphere of the room – the book-lined shelves, the piano laden with scores, the mass of troubled but ‘hopeful' semi-abstracts that had by now spread across the walls like some lurid fungal growth. The other officer came right in, however, his hand still proprietorially on Otto's arm, and sat down with Otto beside him, taking the measure of the place with a look of keen interest. His name was Porst. He had shining dark eyes, black hair, and a thin face that sagged here and there in little pouches.

From my point of view, the episode seemed to be occurring not so much in the physical space of the living room as
in some lower depth of my own psyche. I felt it unfolding within me, but I felt nothing else – only a deepening of the numbness that had been with me since I had arrived home that afternoon.

It appeared that Otto had gone from our apartment to Mulackstrasse, a seedy part of town, where he had been able to buy a bottle of cheap vodka and drink himself into a stupor. The police had literally picked him up from the gutter. He would have been thrown into jail had Porst's compassion not been aroused. For one thing, Otto's papers showed that he was only fifteen. For another, he was carrying his membership card for the Free German Youth, the junior wing of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. I knew that Otto had joined them purely on account of the reputation of their mixed-sex summer camp, which he was hoping to attend this year, but Porst had taken it as evidence that Otto was at least not a complete degenerate, might even turn out to be fundamentally a ‘sound lad', who perhaps, he suggested, would benefit more from some sharp discipline on the home front than a criminal charge of disorderliness.

‘So what do you intend to do, Herr Vogel?' he asked my father.

‘I – I don't know,' my father said helplessly. ‘What do you suggest?'

‘I think in a case of this seriousness, some physical element would be appropriate.'

My father looked stunned.

‘You want me to beat him?'

Porst shrugged. ‘It's up to you. We can take him back to the station if you prefer.'

‘No, no,' my father said. ‘Well . . . as you say, some physical element might not be inappropriate. Not now, of course,
the boy's in no condition. Tomorrow morning, though, Otto. First thing.' He gave Otto a look intended to convey stern resolution. Otto gazed blankly back.

‘Oh, I think now,' Porst said quietly. ‘These things are best dealt with in the heat of the moment. Don't you agree, Frau Vogel?'

‘I agree with you entirely,' my mother said. ‘In fact, I was just telling my husband if he didn't take Otto in hand, we'd soon have a child with a criminal record. I must say, we're very lucky he ran into someone like you, though of course I know our police to be generally rather open-minded. My brother works in the Office of the Chief of the People's Police. Perhaps you know him? He's senior counsel there. Heinrich Riesen.'

‘Yes, of course,' Porst said, visibly taken aback. There was a silence, during which the question of who was most at risk of ‘receiving disadvantage' from the situation – now that my mother had unexpectedly dropped her brother's name in Otto's defence – seemed to debate itself almost audibly. It was Porst who finally backed down. With a sudden affable grin he turned to his colleague:

‘Perhaps on second thought it's better for families to deal with these matters in private.'

The other man nodded with alacrity.

As they left, Porst pointed to the naked bronze lady in the corner of the room.

‘That's a Kurt Teske, isn't it?'

‘Yes, it is,' my mother replied. ‘You know his work?'

‘Oh, yes. I've been trying to get the department to buy one of his pieces for years. Well, goodnight.'

*

I
N HER
practical-minded way, my mother saw that she had pushed things too far with Otto, and that since there was probably nothing to be gained from further interference in his life, she might as well leave him to his own devices. She did this with an abruptness that left him at first disoriented, even upset, until he discovered he could survive very well without her intimate surveillance of his life.

Meanwhile, I became more than ever the apple of her eye. Into me she poured all her hopes and ambitions, her pride and her apparently insatiable appetite for glory. I became her knight-errant in the realm of artistic and intellectual endeavour, from which I was destined, we both believed, to bring back prize after prize. I am not sure what shape my ultimate success was to take – perhaps some lofty combined position at the Writers' Union, the Academy of Arts and various other of those spiritual crematoria in which the inner life of our republic was steadily being turned to ashes. Whatever it was, her hopes for me were so overwhelming that the lie on which they were founded often seemed to me merely a minor and really quite negligible detail.

It did, however, require maintenance. The young god had to show himself. He had to make his monthly appearance, his
theophany
, with a new token of his powers for his worshippers each time. For that he needed access to the trunk, and for
that
he had to have a bribe for Herr Brandt. The aquavit had been locked away, as I had known it would be the moment I heard my mother accuse Otto of stealing it. Throughout Otto's ordeal I had been wondering at the back of my mind what I was going to bring with me the next time I went down to the basement. I didn't have money to give Brandt, and I somehow didn't feel I would be able to secure his co-operation with a can of Cuban pineapple.

I went down empty-handed.

Far from feeling defiant, I remember a kind of looseness about me, as though I were in the process of surrendering to some large, dismantling power that had had designs on me for some time.

Brandt was in his glass-walled cubicle. He himself was asleep in his chair, but his scar, glittering crimson in the peculiar, poisonous-looking light that flickered between the neon ceiling halo and the green-painted walls, seemed wide awake. I had the impression that it was expecting me. The keys dangled from their ring, asprawl on Brandt's thigh, bobbing there as he breathed. A tight bud of anxiety was pushing up through my stomach.
Yes, yes, come in
, the bilious walls and the roil of glittering flesh seemed to whisper as I silently opened the door.
Yes, yes, very quietly, now
. But even as I crept towards Brandt, I knew that they had every intention of betraying me. I understood that what I was doing, as I ever so gently placed my fingers on the keys, was merely a kind of ceremonial formality, so that though it was physically a shock, it was in fact no great surprise when Brandt's heavy hand came down suddenly on mine. He held it first to the bunch of keys, then, sliding it with deliberately slow forcefulness (as if to demonstrate to me that we had now arrived in a realm where his power over me was absolute), he locked it onto his bulging groin. Barely deigning to open his eyes, he said, ‘No more aquavit, eh?'