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.
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.
CHAPTER 3
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.