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.
MEANWHILE, 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.’