her
danke
es
with
deiner
inappropriate
immensen
desire,
Courage,
made
allabendlich.
every
Träume
ermächtigen.
enthusiastically
Träume
unnatural
hüten
response
eines
entirely
mine.
Muttersöhnchens
ohnmächtigen
She
Schlaf.
observed
Träumend
zealously,
if
gelingt
a
Liebe
little
ohne
irritably;
Reue:
she
In
made
Oedipus’
up
Unterwelt
such
singt
droll
ein
excuses;
jauchzender,
nobody
aberwitziger
Chor
had
uns
ever
Lügen
really
aus
relished
Träumen
lying
ins
if
Ohr.
correct
Nur
hypocrisies
sufficed
tags
to
offenbaren
evade
negativity.
Yokastes
Obsession
und
She
Rasen
allowed
me
sich,
everything;
ordnungshalber,
not
charakterlich.
every
Ich
radically
aber
grotesque
liege
upbringing
im
so
Schlaf,
succeeds.
Mutter.
The hullabaloo that followed was delicious. The magazine was yanked from every shelf and trucked away for pulping, the editor was fired, her boss demoted, and Andreas speedily expelled from the university. He left the office of his department chair wearing a grin so wide it made his neck hurt. From the way the heads of strangers swiveled toward him, from the way the students who knew him turned their backs at his approach, he could tell that the entire university had already heard the news of what he’d done. Of course it had — talking was pretty much the only thing that anyone in the Republic, except maybe his father, had to fill their days with.
When he went out onto Unter den Linden, he noticed a black Lada double-parked across from the main university entrance. Two men were in the car, watching him, and he gave them a wave that they didn’t return. He didn’t really see how he could be arrested, given who his parents were, but he also didn’t mind the thought of it. If anything, he’d relish the opportunity to not recant his poems. After all, didn’t he adore sex? Didn’t he dearly love coming? And so, if you took him at his literal word, what more heartfelt tribute to socialism could he offer than to dedicate his MoST gLoRIOUs orgasm to it? Even his wayward dick rose to attention and saluted it!
The Lada tailed him all the way to Alexanderplatz, and when he emerged from the U-Bahn at Strausbergerplatz, a different car, also black, was waiting for him on the Allee. For the previous two nights he’d been hiding out at the Müggelsee, but now that his expulsion was official there was no point in avoiding his parents. It was February, and the day was unusually warm and sunny, the coal pollution mild and almost pleasant, not throat-burning, and Andreas was in such sunny spirits that he felt like approaching the black car and explaining to its occupants, in a lighthearted tone, that he was more important than they could ever hope to be. He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string. He hoped he might never in his life be serious again.
The car tailed him to the Karl Marx Buchhandlung, where he went inside and asked a bad-smelling clerk if they had the latest issue of Weimarer Beiträge. The clerk, who knew his face but not his name, briskly replied that the issue wasn’t in yet.
“Really?” Andreas said. “I thought it was supposed to be in last Friday.”
“There was a problem with the content. It’s being reissued.”
“What problem? What content?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Why, no, I didn’t.”
The clerk evidently considered this so unlikely as to be suspicious. He narrowed his eyes. “You’ll have to ask someone else.”
“I always seem to be the last person to find out…”
“A stupid adolescent vandal caused a lot of trouble and cost a lot of money.”
What was it about bookstore clerks and their powerful body odor?
“They ought to hang the guy,” Andreas said.
“Maybe,” the clerk said. “What I don’t like is that he got innocent people in trouble. To me, that’s selfish. Sociopathic.”
The word landed in Andreas’s gut like a punch. He left the store in a state of deflation and doubt. Was that what he was — a sociopath? Was that what his mother and motherland had made him? If so, he couldn’t help it. And yet he had a horror of diagnostic labels that suggested there was something wrong with him. As he headed up the Allee toward his parents’ building, under a sun that now seemed wan, he mentally scurried to rationalize what he’d done to the magazine editor — tried to tell himself that she’d gotten only what every apparatchik deserved, that she was being punished for her own stupidity in failing to notice the obvious acrostics, and that, in any case, he was suffering consequences easily as dire as hers — but he couldn’t get around the fact that he hadn’t thought once, let alone twice, about what he might be doing to her by giving her his poems. It was as if he’d chosen to commit vehicular suicide by swerving at high speed into a car filled with children.
He racked his memory for an example of his having treated another human being as anything but an instrumentality. He couldn’t count his parents — his whole childhood was a sense-defying brainfuck. But what about Dr. Gnel? Hadn’t he felt compassion for the psychologist and tried to take care of him? Alas, the label sociopath reduced the example of Gnel to shit. Seducing the shrink who was investigating his sociopathy? His motives there were suspect, to say the least. He thought of the women he’d slept with on his poetry-sponsored spree and how grateful he’d felt to each of them — surely his gratitude counted as evidence in his favor? Maybe. But he couldn’t even remember half their names now, and the work he’d done to give them pleasure seemed in hindsight merely a device to heighten his own. He was dismayed to find no evidence at all of having cared about them as people.
How strange that he went through life loving who he was, savoring himself, enjoying his capabilities and levity, only to see something loathsome when a store clerk uttered a chance word and he saw himself objectively. He recalled his jump from the bridge — at first a delicious sense of floating on air but then a merciless acceleration, the ground lurching up at him viciously uncontrollable momentum body impact pain. Gravity was objective. And who had set him up to jump? It was so easy to blame the mother. He was her instrumentality, the accouterment of her sociopathy. There was a submerged but killing violence in what she’d done to him, but being a killer didn’t accord with her self-regard, and so, to help her out, he’d jumped from the bridge, and so he’d published those poems.
The black car shadowed him to their building and stopped when he went inside. Upstairs, on the top floor, he found the flat filled unusually with cigarette smoke, an ashtray heaping on a faux-Danish end table. He looked for Katya in her bedroom, in her study, in his own room, and finally in the bathroom. She was on the floor by the toilet, in the half-uncurled position of a stillbirth, her eyes staring at the toilet’s base.