Humble, yes, and passionate too. The slightest emotional tremor would widen her flecked grey eyes and bring a flush of colour to her pale cheeks. Though she claimed to be intimidated by the ‘intellectual’ tone of our home, and would often describe herself (with curious relish, it struck me) as an ‘ignoramus’ or even an ‘idiot’, she had more real curiosity than any of us. She read voraciously – novels, plays, art history, books about ancient civilisations; anything she could get her hands on. Always, I discovered, with the sense that she wasn’t quite getting the point, wasn’t enough of an intellectual ‘like you or your mother’ to penetrate into the grand revelations about the meaning of life that she was certain lay concealed beneath the surface of the text. She left school at sixteen and apprenticed at a state garment factory, meaning to take her Abitur and go on to a technical institute to learn apparel design, but getting sidetracked instead – into clerical work, administration, bouncing from one secretarial post to another, her neat and pretty appearance keeping her dependably in new bosses whenever she needed a change. And like many people I have met whose buoyant disposition and natural charm should have ordained them, by the laws of nature itself one would think, for a life of uncomplicated happiness, she seemed instead to be doomed to one of serial disappointment and devastation. One after another the men she fell in love with turned out to be shits, thugs, liars or, as in the case of the aforementioned Jürgen, outcasts who could offer her little more than a fleeting, anguished memory of themselves. A recurring motif during my adolescence was the sight of her at the kitchen table, weeping beside my mother, who would offer a selection of dry observations about the man in question and reprove Kitty for her poor judgement. Stony consolation, yet it seemed to be all Kitty wanted, or at any rate felt she deserved.
At one point, some time in her twenties, she made a determined effort to take herself in hand. She got a place to study textiles at a vocational school in Leipzig – a three-year programme that would lead to the Abitur and then, if she was lucky, to university.
After a few months in Leipzig she got involved with a chemistry teacher who turned out to be married with three children. As soon as she discovered this, Kitty tried to break off the relationship, but the teacher declared himself to be unable to live without her, and at the same time threatened to orchestrate her expulsion from the school if she stopped sleeping with him. Confused and frightened, she allowed herself to be blackmailed in this way for several months, aware of a gathering tide of disapproval moving towards her from all quarters, as word of the affair got out. Finally she received a visit from the leadership of the school branch of the FDJ, who monitored, among other things, the development of ‘socialist personality’ in the student body, and put it to her that she might benefit from some serious re-education in this department. A week later, distraught, ashen, her eyelids puffy and scarlet-rimmed from continual weeping, she was back with us in Berlin, her plans for self-improvement in ruins.
She lost some of her spark after that. Her ebullient curiosity gave way to an indifference that might have been merely protective at first, but eventually seemed to enter the actual pigment of her personality. She stopped reading, and spent her evenings watching West German soap operas on the TV instead. Her eyes began to look a little sunken in their sockets. My mother got her a clerical job at the Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands – the women’s organisation where my mother herself now held an advisory position. She cleaned our apartment assiduously every morning before work, and every weekend drank herself to sleep in her little bedroom.
This was a period in which our whole household seemed to be in decline. As predicted, my mother had revived her soirées, on cue to garner the maximum admiration for her pluck without risking disapproval for an unseemly lack of grief over her misfortune. Uncle Heinrich still came, so most of the former habitués still thought it worthwhile to put in an appearance. But there was little pretence, now, of it being anything other than an act of calculated sycophancy. The atmosphere was that of a morgue – a morgue presided over by the king and queen of the underworld, in the shape of Heinrich in his dapper suit, gold party pin in his lapel, and my mother in her ice-blotched crown. I learned somewhere that the Japanese language used to have a particular verb form, the ‘play form’, reserved for addressing the nobility. Decorum required one to suppose that everything these privileged beings did was motivated by pleasure alone. Instead of saying, You’re building a new palace, one would say, You play building a new palace. It seems to me that life at home during this period was qualified by a similarly attenuating form: not the play form but the posthumous form. Posthumously, people stood about at our soirées making glacial conversation. They nibbled posthumously on little underworld nuggets served by Kitty, who drifted posthumously among them like a pallid wraith. To the relief, no doubt, of everybody, no mention was made of my poetry, though I might well have posthumously gone through that rigmarole again if anyone had suggested it, so passive had I become.
The lines of force that had once seemed to plunge from the very source of meaning directly into our lives, shaping and patterning everything we did, had somehow been torn from us. We were unmoored. Events of a freakish, arbitrary nature had begun to occur, though in our posthumous condition we barely even registered their oddness. My father, for instance, began reappearing in the apartment, turning up unannounced, and staying for longer and longer intervals. My mother neither welcomed nor objected to his presence. She tolerated it, sometimes sitting with him in the living room as he silently reclined in his old armchair, sometimes ignoring him. He never stayed the night, and he avoided the soirées, but he was a fixture again, and though nothing was ever said, it was soon evident that he and my mother had re-established their marriage on a posthumous basis, him diminished beyond his already enfeebled stature, her in a position of unassailable yet entirely futile dominance.
Meanwhile, posthumously, my mother and I maintained the fiction that I was the family poet-intellectual. I stayed on at school past tenth grade to prepare for my Abitur. Posthumously, I sat through my classes, did my homework and took the exam. I was in bed with terrible flu when the results arrived. Through the bleary glaze of my fever I was aware of a subdued commotion in the apartment. I realised my mother was frantically making phone calls. Snatches of her conversation drifted into my throbbing head: do something for Stefan?… too sensitive to perform well under that kind of pressure… Gradually I understood that I had done poorly. In a dim, remote way, I felt my mother’s anguish – another humiliation for our friends to enjoy – but I myself was indifferent. I burrowed back down into my fever, luxuriating in the oblivion, wishing it could last for ever. By the time I emerged from it, my mother, true to form, had warded off the calamity by sheer force of will, securing me a place to study philosophy at Humboldt University.