My lethargy thus fed on itself, growing thicker and heavier, until I reached the point where even the simplest, most basic tasks, such as opening a window or closing a door, would have to assert their demands on me with an irresistible urgency, before I could stir myself to perform them.
During this period I formed the idea that every phenomenon that comes into being represents a victory in a struggle against a force willing it not to come into being. I pictured this opposing force as a kind of Chinese Dragon, a Dragon of Stability, jealously guarding the status quo. It patrolled the borders between occupied and unoccupied space, and it lay curled and scowling at the threshold of every possible action. In order to open a window one must first slay the dragon posted to ensure that the closed window remain for ever closed. The fire these dragons breathed took the form of waves of paralysing intertia, a breath of which was enough to overcome you unless you had extraordinary vitality as well as unshakeable belief in the importance of what you wanted to do. More and more I found myself defeated before I could even move. Was it worth the almighty struggle, the expenditure of limited energy, to open that window, when after all nothing material would be changed by doing so, and when, even if I succeeded, another dragon would immediately be posted to ensure that the now-open window would now remain for ever open? Increasingly, it seemed not.
In this way the dragons grew steadily bolder and more numerous, crowding into the most intimate corners of my existence, until I could almost see them, massed about me like iguanas I had seen in pictures of the rocks of the Galapagos Islands, fatly luxuriating in the near-perfect stultification they had finally procured.
The only thing that punctuated my inertia was an occasional bout of yearning. Yearning is the passive form of protest: instead of trying to change things by a concrete attack on what exists in the here and now, it puts its faith in what lies beyond. The objects that triggered this feeling varied, but they had in common a mixture of enchantment and a kind of shyness, an inclination to retreat or disappear from view.
I became susceptible to certain aspects of the natural world for the first time. Nature impinged very little on our life in Berlin, but that made the occasions when it did all the more piercing. A group of slender trees, greyish with a dim, pewter-like gleam and fine raised lines shoaling horizontally around the smooth skin of their trunks, rose from the rubble of a derelict public garden near our apartment. They were grouped closely, in a way that stressed their kinship and gave them the appearance of conversing with each other, in a language known only to themselves. That and the slight glimmering sheen of their barks gave them a mysterious glamour in my eyes. They seemed to be concealing a vivid, secret life of their own. I would stop and look at them, mesmerised by the vague suggestion they gave out, of a realm of existence contiguous with mine, yet utterly unlike it. I yearned to cross the threshold into this realm, to reconfigure myself within its matrix of sap, fibre and sunlight, and there were times, stilling myself to the utmost, when I felt on the point of doing so, whereupon, as though suddenly aware of being encroached on, the trees would abruptly withdraw into themselves, becoming mute, inert, wooden. Likewise with the sky. Mostly it was grey, but sometimes on winter afternoons, as the sun went down behind the great apartment blocks that marched to the farthest horizon in every direction, it would turn a clear amethyst colour, and things that were not noticeable before were briefly inscribed in fire: strange runes, hairpins, chunks of frozen drapery, cat’s paws of dispersing jet vapour; suggestive of the traffic of other empires, parallel with and utterly unlike our own; infinitely beguiling and absolutely elusive.
That which withholds itself came to form my definition of the desirable. Most of the girls at my school came into this category. Katje’s successor in my imagination was a Russian girl named Masha, the daughter of a visiting physicist. She had dark, glistening hair and a smooth, dark-complexioned face with narrow green eyes that turned delicately upwards at the outer corners, giving her a look at once feline and oriental. She was extremely reserved; probably just shy among her new companions, but I chose to attribute it to an innate sense of superiority over us benighted locals. Our German tongue in her Soviet mouth became strangely transformed, the vaunted exactnesses of its agglomerate noun phrases melting back from pure, harsh meaning to something almost music-like as she blithely softened every vowel and liquefied each consonant. On the rare occasions when she condescended to speak in class, I would listen to her with a feeling of anguished desire. Like the trees and the sunset-lit clouds, she gave the impression of being merely the outermost flourish of some immense, hidden universe, and her voice, making sounds that were simultaneously familiar and alien, seemed the point of entry. We never exchanged a word or even a look, but unknown to her she and I conducted a prolonged, passionate love affair. In the private theatre of my psyche, I took her on long walks through the city, glutting myself on the erotic melancholy of her presence, kissing her fervently in the drizzle under budding linden trees, taking her invisibly home to my bed and murmuring her name over and over until I had worked myself into a state of rapture. She disappeared from our midst as unexpectedly as she had arrived. But such was the perverse premium I now put on unattainability that the effect was merely to intensify our relationship, enshrining her in my imagination with the solid gold burnish of an icon from her native land.
And then finally there were the things my father had brought back from America – my Slinky, my diver’s watch, my skyscraper pens. Having neglected them for a while, I once again found myself gratefully appreciating these objects. I pored over them, feeling them dilate in my mind until the world they connoted – snatches of imagined music, imagined flavours and textures, intimations of freer, larger human types – was more vividly present to me than my own surroundings.
One of the advantages of living on our side of the Wall was our ability to believe that happiness did actually exist somewhere on earth, namely in the West. Happiness had a home. For most of my compatriots the name of that home was West Germany, and its furnishings were the products they saw advertised on the West German shows they tuned in to nightly on their TVs – the laundry soaps and detergents whose accompanying celestial and erotic imagery brought home so forcibly the terminal shittiness of our own Spree and Dega. But I seemed to have inherited my mother’s instinct for the deeper hierarchies – either that or my father’s aborted career had made more of an impact on me than I had realised: for me the name of that home was always America. In an obscure, private, but crucial sense, the trees I stared at were American trees, the clouds in the amethyst sky were American clouds, Masha was as American, despite her ostensible Russianness, as my father’s souvenirs. Although I wasn’t conscious of harbouring a wish to ‘go to America’, it strikes me that these acts of passive contemplation, of yearning, were perhaps not so different from the rituals of primitive hunters, who feel it necessary to take possession of their quarry in their imaginations before they can hope to do so in the flesh.
CHAPTER 5
‘The rib’s OK – just badly bruised. But do you see this?’
The emergency room doctor looked at me with a mixture of concern and professional excitement. He had clipped the X-ray to a light box on the wall, giving me a monochrome view of my own rib cage and cloudy interior.