In his remote fashion, Dr Serkin seemed to find these side effects amusing, or at least intriguing, and by association I myself seemed to grow fractionally more interesting in his eyes. As the weeks passed, I sensed a distinct desire on his part to communicate. His habit of mind was apparently such that anything he wished to say had to negotiate its way through a labyrinth of defensive caution, and consequently tended to come out in the form of odd little non sequiturs or else remarks too elliptical or ironic for me to fathom. Not that I was interested in doing so, any more than I was in his more direct attempts to make me open up about myself; an attitude that in retrospect I regret, as I suspect now that he was trying to help me.
After the questions about my side effects, he would exchange his look of private amusement for a more businesslike expression, gesturing at me to remove my shirt so that he could begin the painstaking auscultations that preceded the examination of the X-ray. I sat there passively while he tapped and thumped me, listening through his stethoscope to the secret, involuntary confessions of my body. Once, while he was doing this, he began to question me quite insistently:
‘So you thought you’d broken a rib? That’s what brought you to the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fell down some stairs or something?’ Tap-tap-tapping my sternum.
‘Yes.’
‘How?’ Inching the cold stethoscope across my chest.
‘I was running. I tripped.’
‘That’s all?’
‘There was a loose stone.’
‘It’s interesting that your heart starts pounding like a jack-hammer when you tell me this.’
He glances at me. His eyes are large and distantly kind. Unillusioned, but without cynicism. Cord intact. Taking my X-ray from its folder, he clips it to the light box and puts the previous week’s X-ray up beside it for comparison, switching on the light.
‘The duty doctor who admitted you mentioned he’d noticed abrasions around your throat. What would that have been from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was somebody trying to strangle you?’
The choral effect kicks in.
‘No.’
‘None of my business, eh?’ Fifty voices interrogating me in unison. Commas and colons raining in thick squalls across my eyes… I dispense a shrug, saying nothing.
‘By the way, you have an unusually large lung capacity. Did you know this?’
‘No.’
‘In the old days that would have been seen as the sign of a tremendous élan vital.’
Sullen monosyllable from the patient.
‘Which was not unreasonable, given that the oxidation of tissue is the basis of life, and that the lungs provide the means for that oxidation. Would you say that describes you, an unusual vitality? Stefan?’
‘I don’t know.’ Withdrawing into the tightest corner of myself.
‘It’s true, you seem more a Werther type than a Mynheer Peeperkorn… But on the other hand… well… under certain circumstances certain qualities take the form of their opposite. Like a tarot card upside down. Only sometimes it’s the context that’s upside down, not the card, if you take my meaning. I assume they teach you the tarot at school?’ A sudden sardonic glimmer; it and the words themselves vectoring on a point too remote from my frame of reference for me to locate.
‘No.’
‘What are your plans in life, Stefan?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I had a son a few years older than you. An engineer. He wanted to design a car. A fast car. A beautiful fast machine for travelling on the open road. By which he did not mean a new-model Trabant on the Allied Transit Route.’ He gives a dry, violent laugh. ‘And by the tarot, I mean of course the socialist tarot. The Theoretician. The Party Chairman. The Enemy of the People. The Hanged Comrade. That’s one for you, perhaps, Stefan?’
I see myself beside him at the table, my guard too firmly up against further questioning to take in anything he might be trying to convey to me, let alone anything instructive in the sight of my own rib cage hanging luminously before me on the light box. And I see Dr Serkin peering at the two images, into them, rather, as if he were staring into deep space. The ethereal skeins of tissue, the ghostly vein branches outlining the lungs’ lobules of infundibula, look like maps of the heavens, full of star clusters, strange nebulae, hazy auroras. Closing one eye, the doctor holds his pen up to each X-ray in turn. With his air of powerful, suppressed disquiet, he seems less like a doctor than a tutelary spirit, trying to lead a reluctant initiate to the brink of some new realm of knowledge. A Fluchthelfer.
‘What happened? Did you try to hang yourself?’
‘No!’
From a tree in an old quarry in Friedrichshain, Dr Serkin. Overlooking the Spree River. A birch tree with its own diseased core; a rotten branch that broke when I jumped. I didn’t know then that a birch among taller trees was more than likely to be dead; light-starved, decaying from within. I fell onto my back, then the heavy branch, still roped to my neck, came crashing down onto my rib. Not so much a Werther type as a circus clown.
‘Well, anyway,’ says the doctor, ‘Felix culpa. Isn’t that what they say? Lucky fall? I mean, if you hadn’t fallen, you wouldn’t have found out about the TB – perhaps until it was too late.’
You mean if I hadn’t tried to kill myself, I might have died? Is that what you were telling me, Dr Serkin?
He never mentioned his son again, and I never asked what had happened. One has to feel vaguely human oneself before one can start caring about other humans. Sorgen: to care; so much more absorptive, somehow, of the world’s sorrows than the English word, but not a part of my active vocabulary before I met Inge.
CHAPTER 6
Speaking of feeling human, it is now the moment for me to say a few words about our ‘lodger’, Kitty.
Katerina Rust (to give her her full name) was the daughter of a serving girl, Lotte Rust, who had spent most of her short life on the estate of my mother and uncle’s family near Breslau, in Silesia.
During the war Lotte and my mother stayed together at the house (a small castle, by all accounts), which was turned into a convalescent home for wounded officers. When the Red Army arrived on German soil and the Reich began falling into the pandemonium that preceded its final collapse, the two women, both still in their teens, fled west together, preserving, by mutual agreement – so my mother claims – the hierarchy of their relationship through thick and thin, surviving refugee camps, marauding troops from General Chuikov’s army, cold, hunger and numerous other indignities arising out of our nation’s unappreciated attempt to spread the gift of itself to the rest of the world. After the dust settled, they found themselves reunited with Heinrich (who had served in the army) in Soviet-occupied Berlin.
It seems Lotte was an attractive woman. She formed a liaison with a young Russian Comecon officer, a connection that gave the new household definite advantages in terms of political protection and basic necessities. The affair ended abruptly when the officer was posted back to Moscow, leaving Fräulein Rust heartbroken, and pregnant with Kitty. She died of diphtheria when Kitty was six, entrusting the girl’s upbringing to my mother, who fulfilled the obligation in her own fashion. When I was very young, I thought of Kitty as my older sister, but as I grew up I saw that her status in our household wasn’t after all quite that of a fully paid-up family member. Though she was fed and clothed as well as the rest of us, and though there was never any mention of anything so vulgarly uncommunist as servants or mistresses, there seemed to be an understanding between her and my mother that she was to perform all the more menial of the household chores. It was Kitty who swept and dusted, who operated the People’s Own Washer we proudly purchased in the sixties, hooking its hose up to the kitchen sink and standing guard for the hour and a half it took to heat up (someone had to be there in case its gaskets burst); Kitty who served the titbits at my mother’s soirées, Kitty who was sent out to stand in line for bananas or toothpaste or the cans of Schmalzfleisch my father liked to have on his toast for breakfast. She never complained or showed any sign of resenting her position; in fact, she seemed deeply attached to us all, and strangely devoted to my mother, as though she had inherited her own mother’s accommodating humility.