Suddenly, effortlessly, it was over. Almost too effortlessly, perhaps. With the feeling of a prisoner let out of his dungeon only to be told that the door had never in fact been locked, I drifted back up to the surface of my life, utterly bewildered.
Here, I discovered, things had been proceeding in quite momentous ways, apparently without need of my active participation. At school in particular, where I had been coasting for some time in a state of almost narcoleptic dreaminess, my life really did seem to have taken on a life of its own.
Ours was one of the elite high schools of Berlin, reserved for children of party officials. We had the best technical and athletic equipment, as well as the most highly qualified teachers, at our disposal, and it was expected that we would follow in the footsteps of our devout, industrious parents. Foreign and domestic dignitaries were constantly being wheeled into our morning assembly to impress on us the heroic nature of our destiny. Abrassimov, the Soviet ambassador, pinned Red Star badges on our chests one morning, carrying himself with the fantastical frostiness he was famous for, and that he evidently thought appropriate to his viceregal status in our republic. Alexander Schalck-Golodowski came to talk to us about so-called ‘German-German’ relations. Erich Mielke, Politburo Member for Security, led us in our Pioneer Greeting one morning, before going on to address us on the joys of a career in counterintelligence. Guenter Mittag came to us from Economic Affairs… Illustrious names once; names to conjure with, their mere utterance sufficient to induce that sensation of awe reserved for remote, solemn powers – all gone now, disgraced, ridiculed, forgotten.
My mother’s visit to my class at the time of our abortive move to New York turned out to have had one lasting effect: it had seriously compromised my position among my classmates. Although I hadn’t been actively shunned, I had been put into a kind of social quarantine, a limbo-like condition where I was under close scrutiny pending the appearance of further symptoms that would indicate a full-blown case of unpopularity.
Unpopularity, as any schoolchild knows, is a highly specific spiritual sickness which can strike almost anybody at any given moment. It is as irrefutably real as the measles, and in its own way almost as contagious. Once a person has been diagnosed with it there is nothing he can do except wait patiently for it to run its course. Attempts to deny it or overcome it by ingratiating oneself with the uncontaminated will only result in ever crueller forms of rejection.
My fall from grace came about almost casually. One afternoon in summer, during our annual Hans Beimler athletic and paramilitary contests, I saw a group of my classmates sitting together on the grass of one of the playing fields. I had just won my quarterfinal in the two-hundred-metre dash, qualifying me for the next round, and I was feeling buoyant enough to join the group without being invited. They had been laughing, but by the time I joined them they had fallen quiet.
‘Let’s try it on Stefan,’ somebody said. They had evidently been playing some game. I looked about cheerfully, always ready to offer myself as a source of entertainment.
A girl called Katje Boeden spoke. Katje was the daughter of a high-ranking official in Hermann Axen’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I had a private connection to her. A short time before my father’s debacle in New York, her family had made a friendly overture to mine, and we had visited them at their house in the Wandlitz compound outside the city. It was a warm home, full of games and toys, and decorated with tribal art from Zanzibar, which gave it an almost bohemian flavour. Katje had been wearing a smocked green dress. On her blossoming body it had seemed to gather up all the innocent wonder of childhood and draw it surreptitiously into a strange new context – that of imminent sexual awakening. The effect on me had been powerful. While Otto went off with her older brother Paul, she took me into the garden where she had a tree house in a half-dead beech tree. We sat talking for what seemed hours – about what, I have no recollection, but I was bewitched by her. Unfortunately, my father lost his job soon after, and our visit was neither returned nor repeated.
Over the next two or three years, Katje had grown extremely pretty – petite, with sharp, delicate features, sparkling blue eyes and fair hair which she wore in a tight, gleaming crown of braids. Though she never made any reference to our meeting at her home, she was always friendly towards me.
‘Name the first three animals to come into your head, Stefan,’ she said.
I forget the first two animals I named, but the third was the three-toed sloth. After a pause there was a titter of laughter: gentle enough at first. Conscious of being a good sport, I sat with my smile, waiting for an explanation. But as the merriment seemed about to subside, a peal of louder, more fulsome and somehow more ominous-sounding laughter broke from Katje. For several seconds it sounded out alone; clear and pure, like the clarion call announcing the arrival of a new force into the field. Then one by one the others joined in, and suddenly they were all doubled up with the kind of wild, hysterical, self-perpetuating laughter that teenagers everywhere so enjoy being overcome by. I continued smiling, telling myself there was nothing to be dismayed about, and yet feeling a faint ache in my throat, and sensing, distantly, the advent of something momentous and catastrophic.
‘The first animal is how you see yourself,’ a boy told me when the group had begun to calm down, ‘the second is how others see you. And the third is what you really are.’
‘A three-toed sloth,’ Katje shrieked, and once again they were shaking their sides and rolling on the grass, helpless with laughter.
A day or two later, during a geography class, where we were giving presentations on the tropical zone, a boy stood up and announced with a sly grin that he was going to talk about the three-toed sloth. I would say that my heart sank, except that ‘sank’ implies a depth of plummeting that wasn’t quite what I experienced. Rather, my heart slid down a little, then seemed to move more in a sideways direction, so that as I heard the boy inform us that a sloth stays so still that mould grows in its hair, that its maximum speed – that of a mother sloth hurrying to protect her child – is five metres per hour, that they aren’t hunted because even when shot dead they continue clinging to their branch, not dropping until they reach an advanced state of decomposition, and so on, while smiles danced about the room like little sunbeams, what I felt was not some ever-blackening descent into misery, but more a kind of anaesthetising removal, as if I were travelling out beyond the walls and windows towards some point of absolute detachment and indifference. I saw that I had fallen from favour, and I accepted this without protest – inward or outward. After all, I told myself, feeling my familiar sense of déjà vu, this had already happened. It had happened long ago: what had just occurred was no more than a case of fallible human judgement belatedly recognising the verdict handed down against me long ago by some impassive agency of reality itself.
The last athletic qualifying rounds were held on a sweltering, overcast afternoon. The acrid smell from the chimneys of the nearby foundries and breweries was particularly heavy in the air. I sat on a bench alone, waiting for the semifinals of the two hundred metres. Though I wasn’t what you would call an athlete, I had always been able to cover short distances at above-average speed. I relate this faculty directly to my ability to think up ingenious falsehoods at short notice. Both have to do with the instinct for evasion, which has always been more highly developed in me than that of confrontation. As I sat on the bench I fantasised about winning my round and then going on to win the final itself the following week. In my vision, my face remained stern as I crossed the finishing line, as though to convey that I scorned any hope that this victory might alter my status as an outcast. But as I left the field I would catch Katje’s eye, and although she would say nothing, the brief stalling of her attention would tell me that a secret connection had been opened up, linking her in her realm of light to me in my darkness.