‘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.
LATER 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.’
IN 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.