I had never shown the slightest interest in philosophy, but the subject was undersubscribed at that time, owing to a crack-down in the department. The notorious Professor Havemann had been ousted for introducing heretical texts into the syllabus, and a forbidding Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy now prevailed, putting off all but the most dedicated or desperate young men and women. In this way my mother found herself permitted to mention, casually, whenever the opportunity arose, her son ‘the philosophy student, yes, at Humboldt.’
But Kitty.
One summer my mother took us off for a vacation on the island of Rügen. It was just the three of us: herself, me and Kitty. Otto had decided to pursue a career in the military – another turn of events that at one time would have stunned us; would have had to be discussed, analysed, cocooned in acceptable phrases, until it could be honourably accommodated into the grain of our identity as a family, but which we now, in our benumbed, posthumous fashion, accepted with a shrug as part of the general unexpectedness of things – and he was away on manoeuvres.
The weather was good. The Baltic waves seemed to relax from their solemn and exclusive duty as the concealers of Soviet submarines, and emitted an occasional gratuitous sparkle.
We stayed in a concrete beach hut rented out by a state hotel in Kühlungsborn. It was peaceful enough that we could each settle into our own rhythms, and a characteristically posthumous, atomised little holiday seemed set to ensue. My mother had taken up oil painting, and spent the days on a sand dune painting seascapes. Kitty lay on the beach listening to the radio and sunning herself. I stayed in the little house most of the time, smoking cigarettes in luxurious defiance of Dr Serkin’s orders, and reading about Joseph Stalin. As a student at Humboldt I had access to books that were otherwise unavailable, including a large trove of both pre- and post-1956 (the year Khrushchev denounced him) tomes on the illustrious tyrant, in whom I had developed perhaps the only genuine intellectual interest I have ever known. I was reading about the years before the revolution, when his personality was just beginning to declare itself. In 1913 he was exiled to a remote region of Arctic Siberia. The temperature fell to minus forty in the winter, and swarms of mosquitoes made life almost as unbearable in the summer. An occasional care package arrived from the Alliluyev family in the Caucasus. Once, in a letter thanking them, Stalin asked for postcards with scenes of nature on them. ‘I have a stupid longing to look at some landscape,’ he wrote, ‘if only on a piece of paper.’ I was struck by the unexpectedly plangent tone of this. That this ‘grey and colourless mediocrity’, as Trotsky called him, could have possessed anything so poetic as a capacity for yearning; that the man in whom, later, a casual whim of displeasure could result in fifty thousand political prisoners in Bamlag being wired together like logs, trucked into the wilderness and shot, could ever have experienced feelings of longing for the natural world, was fascinating to me. I was lying on my bed reflecting on it – not in an analytic spirit so much as an aesthetic one – idly revolving it as one might a scene one has been unexpectedly struck by in a film or novel, when Kitty came into the room in her swimsuit.
My room led to the shower, and that appeared to be where she was heading. But before she got to the bathroom door, she came to a halt, slowed involuntarily, it seemed, by some thickness in the air. She stood rather vacantly for a moment, then peered at me.
‘It’s dark in here.’
I could tell from her voice that she was in an odd mood. It was early for her to be returning from the beach, and I wondered if she had had too much sun. She blinked in a bewildered, sunstruck way. I could smell the sea on her, and the oily sweetness of her tanning lotion. Her cheeks were a hectic crimson. She smiled distractedly, then moved on towards the bathroom. As she opened the door, she turned back.
‘Where’s your mother?’
Again something quizzical and involuntary in her stance, as though she had been struck like a bell, and these words were what chimed out. Where’s your mother?
I shrugged. ‘Out.’
As I said this, my eye met hers and something unexpected and momentous travelled between us.
I barely noticed Kitty in those days. She was just a part of the neutral human furniture of my life, as I assume I was of hers. It was a shock, then, to find myself staring into the grey depths of her eyes, which stared back in a manner both startled and intrepid, as if daring me not to look away and pretend that what had just happened had not. And as though some barrier between us had just been removed, I was suddenly physically aware of her as a woman.
It was she who broke off the look, moving on into the bathroom to take her shower. I returned to my book. It didn’t reveal whether the Alliluyevs ever sent Stalin the postcards he asked for. I knew that he later married the daughter, Nadezhda, and that after they quarrelled at a party in the Kremlin, she went home and killed herself, though rapidly, as the effect of Kitty’s look kept expanding inside me, all of this started to seem quite far away, and I found myself in a strange state comprised equally of arousal and anxiety. It occurred to me that Kitty’s innocent question about my mother must have touched on some latent veto lodged in each of us, setting it flashing like an alarm light, and that it was this that had given our look its peculiar intensity. I saw her eyes again – the transparent grey like heat shadows on a wall – and a great jolt of desire went through me. I tried to read on about Stalin. Even in that godforsaken place, he chose to cultivate aloofness rather than sociability, pressing his granite-like ego against the fellow Bolshevik who shared his hut, till the man moved out. I remembered how Otto had once admitted to me that he fantasised about Kitty when he jerked off. He was always very frank about sex; said he liked to imagine doing it to her from behind, one hand over each of her breasts. The image of him sneaking up on the ‘upward-aspiring’ Kurt Teske bronze in our living room and groping her billowy breasts came back to me on a strange, rippling current of hilarity. I exchanged the Kurt Teske for Kitty in my mind’s eye, then Otto for myself, half consciously donning his free and easy personality over mine – a psychic mask. At once I felt startlingly alive; full of odd, crackling powers. Kitty came out of the shower wrapped in a towel, her darkened, steel-coloured hair straggling over her cheeks. I looked at her with a brazenness that stalled her and seemed to confuse her for a moment. Then, to my amazement, she giggled and ran out of the room. Without thinking, I got up and went after her. She ran into the dining room, looking back at me with bursts of high, breathless laughter, and before I knew it I was chasing her around the furniture like some priapic satyr pursuing a scantily clad nymph, until I caught her and we fell together on the sticky plastic of the living room sofa. As I held her there, my hands on the soft muscles of her arms, she looked up at me with an expression of calm and – to my eye – somewhat sceptical curiosity, as if to say, So? And now what are you proposing to do? I was more or less inexperienced in these matters. I had exempted myself from the sexual fray at Humboldt, in the belief that, damaged as I was, entering it would only result in pain and humiliation. Now, as Kitty looked at me, I could feel a multitude of blurry uncertainties beginning to teem. I found myself picturing Otto in the raindrop camouflage of his NVA Felddienstuniform and thinking of how I had been rejected from military service because of my TB, and had served instead with the Construction Brigade – the Bausoldaten – clearing woodland for army barracks, in the plain grey uniform of the noncombatant, my ignominious little shovel-insignia gleaming at my shoulder. For an anxious moment these images threatened to pry away the Otto-self with which I had armoured my own, but then – such was my peculiar cast of mind at that time – I was fortified by the sudden, reassuring memory that Stalin too had been turned down for military service, because of a childhood injury to his left arm, and with a feeling of cold, brutal lust, I tore the towel off Kitty and began ineptly mauling her naked body. She lay observing me dispassionately for a few moments, then sat up, putting her hands over mine with soft firmness.