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?’
I nodded, and he, rousing himself from his chair, his hand still gripping mine, said, ‘Come on, then,’ and as if we had long ago agreed to this contingency, we went down together to the storage area, locking the door behind us.
I HAVE little graphic recollection of what I or Brandt actually did that afternoon or the afternoons that followed at monthly intervals. What survives in me more vividly than the physical details was the sense, already familiar to me at that age, that the harm being done to me had in some mysterious fashion already been done. It had already happened. Not literally, perhaps, but in a manner that made this manifestation of it little more than a kind of hieroglyphic record of an earlier, vaster event, as, say, a particular rock formation, made visible by a mudslide, records a seismic upheaval that took place in the earth’s tectonic plates aeons ago. If there was any element of surprise, it was simply in the discovery that my blightedness was not by some miracle going to turn out to exclude this particular area of my being. But then I had had no reason to suppose that it would.
The other thing I remember is that Brandt never seemed to experience anything resembling pleasure during our encounters. The vacant look on his large, round face (the face of a baby left to bloat in a jar of formaldehyde) would turn actively gloomy when I arrived at his booth for the key now. As we walked in silence down the service stairway, I had the sense that he was moving there through the same miasma of dimly apprehended horror as I was, and as we groped and grappled lugubriously together in the near-blackness of the storage room, a pair of lobsters in a murky tank, he had the weary air of someone undergoing a peculiarly burdensome penance. I think of the paintings of Bosch – the demons as tormented-looking as their victims, the two at times barely distinguishable as they reach down into each other with the blunt instrument of themselves, entering and breaking. When it was over he would leave me to the privacy of my mother’s trunk, limping off in a private cloud of muttered imprecations directed as much at the world in general as at me personally.
This state of affairs continued for perhaps a year. I was aware that it was unhealthy, to say the least, but at the same time it seemed inconceivable that it could be otherwise. It had come about by a process of invincible logic, one that I myself was complicit in, even if I hadn’t initiated it, and for all its unwholesomeness, I recognised in its textures, its particular twists and turns, something that felt peculiarly me-like. I had created this strange, convoluted existence, as a sea creature creates the shell peculiar to itself. The distinguishing feature of this particular shell – to pursue the analogy – turned out to be its steady strangulation of its inhabitant. By the time I was freed from it, I was more dead than alive.
CHAPTER 4
Already largely absent from us in spirit, my father began to absent himself physically at this time. He let it be known at work that he was available for the least desired assignments, and began spending weeks at a time at convocations of minor functionaries in Sofia and Bucharest. My mother appeared not to notice, or at least not to mind, continuing indefatigably along the path she had chosen for herself. And then one day, when my father was away on one of his trips, she announced to us over dinner that he would not be coming back to live with us. He had fallen in love with another woman, she informed us drily, a colleague in his department. When he returned to Berlin he and my mother would be divorced, she told us, and he would be moving in with his colleague.
None of us had had any inkling of this, and we pressed my mother for more details, but she appeared to have taken the position that the event was nothing more than a minor annoyance, and the less said about it the better. Unsentimentality over matters of the heart was a point of pride among the educated classes in the former GDR, and my mother’s behaviour was doubtless an attempt to prove herself a superior adherent to this code. It must have cost her something, though: when Kitty suddenly burst into tears at the table, my mother told her extremely sharply to stop. There was a moment’s silence. Then her own eyes – to her apparent astonishment – filled with tears (the first and last time any of us beheld such a phenomenon), and she abruptly left the room. A stoical dryness was soon restored, however, and after that she contrived to give a characteristically lofty appearance of being above such commonplace emotions as wounded pride, petty vengefulness, or plain sorrow.
For the most part life continued unaltered after my father’s departure, but there was one significant change. Although she may have considered it beneath her to display any personal response to the event, my mother seemed to feel that some kind of ‘official’ response was called for, just as a government is sometimes obliged to respond to some event its individual ministers are personally indifferent to, for the sake of the public’s sense of balance. The response she settled on was a temporary suspension of her soirées. In this, as in all matters, there was no doubt a strategic motive: namely that their resumption, whenever it came, would be seen as a triumph over adversity. But whatever the case, I was abruptly liberated from my treadmill. No more fraught recitals, no more forgery, no more furtive dalliances with Brandt in the dark basement with its little mice and moths and beetles writhing and blinking on their glue traps all around us.